Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/thirteen-questions-about-one-thing).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes episode 16, yet another podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

I should correct or amend, a friend of mine was listening to the podcast. He says, “I’m not a screenwriter and I find the podcast interesting. So you need to stop saying that header thing.”

I felt that just because we might be interesting to screenwriters doesn’t mean it’s exclusively intended for screenwriters.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** You’re welcome to listen to this if you’re a nurse, for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, dresses are made for women but men can wear dresses.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s completely your choice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is in the digital world. Listen to whatever you want to listen to. That’s really the goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why should we stop saying that it’s for screenwriters because you like it and you’re not one? Look at this. I’m doing everything I can to lose listeners.

**John:** Yeah, you really are.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the worst.

**John:** Yeah. I should explain to you listeners that often Craig will sort of ramble at the start of these podcasts and we’ll have to snip thing out, because we’ll always end up talking about terrible things about tragedies that happened during the second World War to certain groups of people. It just never really plays well in the podcast. So I’m always flagging to Stuart, “Maybe you could lose that little part of what Craig said at the header here.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** I won’t do it today.

**John:** Good. A little bit of housekeeping before we get started. This is Episode 16 of Scriptnotes and I keep getting confused about what number we’re on because you and I did some episodes that got thrown out because they were terrible.

On iTunes, only the last 10 episodes are listed. So someone who is coming to the show for the first time, they think, “Oh, they have 10 episodes recorded.” No. In fact we have more episodes recorded and you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcasts to see everything that we’ve done and listen to everything that we’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Dig deep into the archives.

**John:** Indeed. And if you’re digging deep into the archives, you’ll also see transcripts for all of our previous episodes. And not every podcast is going to give you a complete transcript of everything that’s said.

**Craig:** But ours does.

**John:** We do. Craig, you meticulously check the transcript to make sure it’s exactly what you said, correct?

**Craig:** I pour through it. Well, first of all, I do the transcripts myself. John pays me $33. I do the transcripts. It takes me about six hours.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then I recheck it and then we put it up. I try and put back in the stuff about the Holocaust that he takes out.

[laughter]

Try and edit that out, Stuart.

**John:** Ugh. And here’s the best part about our conversation right now is a day from now somebody, I presume in India, is going to be transcribing this conversation about the podcast being transcribed.

**Craig:** I mean no offense.

**John:** No. But I think it’s kind of great. I think it’s just wonderful that there’s a cycle of digital creation in the world that hopefully is making this profitable for someone to transcribe.

**Craig:** Somebody somewhere should be making money off of this because I’m not.

**John:** No, I’m not either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A podcast — people are interested in like, “Oh, I want to do my own podcast.” A podcast is not expensive in any real way. I mean, Craig and I had to buy our microphones and that was kind of it in terms of actual hard costs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although you made me buy this $16,000 microphone. I don’t know why. John insisted that we both get this very rare Neumann microphone that was used initially at the old RCA. I think Toscanini used it for recordings.

**John:** Yeah. If you want a visual for it, it has the springs all over it and it would be very good if you’re a lone singer at a USO Show and you’re on a spotlight. This is the kind of thing you might do. Or if you were George Clooney and you were making Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s the kind of microphone that the woman would sing into in Good Night, and Good Luck.

**Craig:** Yeah. We always go vintage. We don’t like…

**John:** The other thing the microphone is fantastic for is recording all the bus noise outside Craig’s window.

**Craig:** Well, it was designed originally for bus noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting fact.

**John:** It does that really well.

**Craig:** By Germans.

**John:** By Germans.

**Craig:** Right before that thing they didn’t do.

[laughter]

You should have never said anything.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, I think you wanted to bring up our first sponsor. Our podcast has its very first sponsor this week.

**Craig:** Yes, yes!

**John:** I’m so excited to be able to introduce this, a sponsor who will pay us absolutely no money.

**Craig:** That’s right. He’s not really a sponsor because we have no costs, but our mutual friend, Derek Haas, a terrific screenwriter who works with Michael Brandt. They’ve written movies like 3:10 to Yuma and Wanted. Derek is a novelist as well. He is writing a series of books based on a hit-man character and his latest book, Dark Men, is out. You can get it on Amazon. Dark Men by Derek Haas, H-A-A-S.

If you’re saying, “That’s not right. It should be Derek Haas,” correct, but he insists on pronouncing his last name Haas. I have to say, look, you change your name because people didn’t pronounce it correctly. Haas seems like the worst choice of pronunciation for that name. You just imagine what a fourth grader does with that. But he insists.

**John:** Derek’s also from Texas so I think that explains a lot.

**Craig:** Oh, you think it’s easier in Texas to walk around with the name Haas?

**John:** Well, I think you also might just make bad choices if you’re from Texas.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Well, listen, Texas is a big place now. Our friends in Austin, for instance —

**John:** Our friends in Austin are fantastic. There are many awesome things in Texas. I just feel like if you’re going to be in Texas, maybe Haas really is a better way to pronounce your name because it might be the more natural way people are going to say your name anyway.

**Craig:** It matches the drawl.

**John:** It matches a little bit of a drawl.

**Craig:** Well, Derek, I hope you got your money’s worth. I hope you got your zero dollars worth from that bit of promotion, most of which was spent on how ridiculous your name is.

**John:** Yes. We will include a link to Derek’s book on Amazon in the show notes. Every episode of our podcast has a list of links. You can go to the actual post on the site johnaugust.com and find this post, and you’ll find a link to it. You’ll also find a link to Popcorn Fiction, which is the short story collection that Derek initially created and I think, introduced to maintain that editorial control over…

I wrote a short story for that. You wrote a short story for that.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Many screenwriters have written short stories for that. That’s another Derek Haas creation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Derek, by the way, somehow is able to write all the movies for Brandt and Haas and write fiction on top of that. That seems kind of crazy and impossible.

**Craig:** Well, Derek has this thing, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t have a thing that I have, which is a neurosis. He is the least neurotic writer I have ever met in my life. He’s happy. He sits down to write and he writes. He doesn’t sit there and torture himself and then suddenly novels are done and scripts are done. It’s remarkable.

One of the happiest people I know. I don’t get it.

**John:** Yes. Some part of his brain got burned out early on. I think they reached up a wire through his nose and shocked the little part of self doubt. And God bless him. We have Derek Haas to —

**Craig:** By the way, if they offered that as an elective surgery, I would absolutely do it.

[laughter]

**John:** You would completely take it.

**Craig:** I feel like my brain is mostly that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Self recrimination.

[crosstalk]

**John:** The self doubt and…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Our last podcast was talking about residuals. We got some good questions and we already provided some good answers I think on residuals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we got really just an amazing essay, which I’m going to call now Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley, which feels like a short film — or actually a long film — that you’d find at the Sundance Film Festival, but is in fact a series of questions by Daniel Barkeley, all of which were worth answering. So I thought we would just quickly power through Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do you need a breath? Do you need a drink of water?

**Craig:** No. Although I remember that some of them were about TV and I’m a little fuzzy on that so I’ll say “Pass” for the ones I don’t immediately know the answer to.

**John:** I looked up answers kind of for the TV ones.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But we’re going to do our best. That’s what we’re going to do.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We can’t promise more than our best.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “In television, how is the residual allocated between the Created By, Storied By, and Teleplay credits?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Guess.

**Craig:** I don’t think Created By gets any residuals. I think Created By gets some sort of pass of payment that’s negotiated individually by the writer and that all of the residuals are attached to the story and the Teleplay By.

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Woo! Ding-ding-ding!

**John:** Ding-ding-ding! And the split is the same as features, which is the next thing we’re going to talk about. “So how is the percentage credit on a film or TV episode determined?”

**Craig:** 25 percent of residuals are attached to Story or Screen Story By and 75 percent of residuals are attached to Screenplay or Teleplay By.

**John:** What a perfectly concise answer, and actually correct.

**Craig:** Thank you. Woo!

**John:** Question three. “The Hangover Part II used characters created by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Did Mr. Lucas and Mr. Moore” — I love the Mr.’s in there.

**Craig:** Misters, yes.

**John:** “…receive residuals for Hangover II?”

**Craig:** They do not. The Characters Created By is part of a separated right. If you are the credited story writer, so if you receive Story credit or Written By credit for an original screenplay that is produced, on all sequels you will receive contractually a Characters Created By credit. That credit comes with no financial attachment whatsoever.

**John:** Yeah.

“Who pays residuals when Go airs on HBO?” — And Go has been airing on HBO quite a lot, so hooray. — “Is it HBO that pays the WGA or is it the producer of the film or the original distributor of the film?”

The answer is it is the distributor of the film. So there is one entity who is responsible for paying residuals, and that is the entity that has the, in this case, home video rights to the movie Go. So in this case it’s Sony or Columbia TriStar or some giant shell corporation.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** You don’t think that’s right?

**Craig:** Well, I’m just wondering because I always thought that the people who paid were the people that employed the writer under a WGA contract. If, for instance, one company employs the writer and produces the movie, and then another company simply distributes it, I think the employer pays the residuals.

**John:** You could be correct. In the case of Columbia TriStar, they are on entity so therefore that could be a little bit murky. I’m also, though, going based on The Nines, which is a movie that we independently produced and then we sold to Sony Newmarket. Sony and Newmarket, which is really just Sony, is responsible for handling all the residuals on that movie. And me and the production company are not responsible for the residuals.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because what happens is, yeah. There’s something called an assumption agreement and it gets really complicated. But once they buy it and they purchase it, they have to do it under a WGA deal. For instance, on The Nines, they didn’t just buy the movie. They also bought the screenplay.

Once they buy the screenplay, then they are the owner and they are the WGA employer. I believe it’s the WGA employing entity. So either way, it’s never the “producer.” It’s always the company that’s actually making the WGA deal, I believe.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not HBO. It’s not the people who buy the movie.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s the people who are showing the movie on a channel.

**Craig:** Certainly not, no.

**John:** It’s not, yeah.

**Craig:** It would be the people that hired the writer and produced the movie, usually one in the same.

**John:** Yeah.

Question number five. “I often heard it said that writers/producers ‘have a piece of the show.’ How is this distinct from residual payments?”

**Craig:** Well, a piece of the show is some sort of profit participation. You are a part owner of the show so when receipts come in that are above and beyond costs, and there are all sorts of ways of defining that, people who have a piece of the show get paid a portion of the money the show generates.

Residuals have nothing to do with whether the show is in profit or not. They are simply attached to exhibitions or repeat showings of something. Having a piece of the show is something that you negotiate individually. Residuals are something that are already negotiated as part and parcel of the union contract.

**John:** Yeah. If there’s nothing else to take from our repeated discussions on residuals, it’s that you get residuals no matter how successful the film is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Whether it makes $5 at the box office or $50 million at the box office, you will get residuals. You’re more likely to get more residuals from a very successful run in post-theatrical life if your movies are incredibly successful. But the movie does not have to be profitable for you to see residuals.

**Craig:** But there’s probably some examples where I can imagine a movie that did fairly well in theaters and maybe just wasn’t a big seller on DVD. The writers of that movie could make less in residuals than, say, Mike Judge on Office Space, which made nothing in theaters and was massive on DVD.

**John:** Yeah. You know what? That actually was question number six. You kind of got ahead of us.

**Craig:** Hm.

**John:** His question was, “In film, it seems that the example John gave means that it is not uncommon to earn more in residuals than upfront payments. Is this a common experience in television as well?” So we were talking about film. In TV would you make more in residuals than you made on the first writing of a show? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not anymore. I think those days are gone. It used to be that that could be the case, back in the days of the healthy network rerun. I think those days are gone. I could be wrong. Maybe we’ll hear from somebody that writes in TV frequently.

In movies, that would be the exception to the rule, generally speaking. Well, no. I take it back. In movies, if it’s a big hit I could definitely see you making more in residuals than in payments.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would you please discuss the differences between foreign levies and residuals?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. So a big topic, and I’ll boil it down very quickly. So we have work for hire here. We don’t own the copyright to our work. The rest of the world doesn’t have work for hire. Not only that, the rest of the world thinks work for hire is a big scam and that, in fact, an individual must be the copyright or the author in law and in fact of any particular audiovisual work.

So in other countries, one of the things they do to reward authors for reuse of things it they charge a tax or a levy on blank media — cassettes, rewritable CDs, even hard drives, things like that — anything that people might be using to make copies of television shows or movies. That tax money in part is then parceled back out to the authors.

The problem is who is the author of Go? Is it John August or is it Sony? In the United States it’s Sony. In France it’s John August. So when they started collecting this money and we started looking for it, the MPAA here in the United States said, “Uh, we’re the authors so we’ll take that money.”

And the writers and directors who considered themselves both in authorship position on these movies, and foreign countries consider writers and directors both authors of movies, said, “No, no, no. That’s our money.” And essentially there was this massive threat of a lawsuit that would have ended up in The Hague for God knows how long.

So a compromise was struck. Over time I think we have moved to a place now where writers and directors receive half of the share of this money and the companies receive the other half.

In time, I think given the trend, eventually writers and directors will receive all of it, I think over time. In the meantime what it means is that every few months you might get a check. It’s not a lot of money but it’s some money, hundreds, maybe a couple thousand for more popular fare. That is sort of an aggregate amount of money that’s been collected from all of these foreign tax collection agencies.

**John:** Yeah. And the math behind it is crazy.

**Craig:** Insane.

**John:** You couldn’t possibly imagine it, because it’s not really tracking the success of one of your movies. It’s the success of your movies and the tax collections across a whole range of European countries. It is nuts.

**Craig:** It is nuts, and it also gets stranger for television, because a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll re-chop these things up. I mean, Germany may buy a package of five shows and chop them up and make one weird long show out of it. Well, who gets the…? It’s crazy.

The bookkeeping is crazy. And frankly, the Writers Guild doesn’t do a particularly good job of getting this money to the people quickly. There’s a lot of controversy about whether the Writers Guild should be collecting this money at all because it doesn’t just collect money for Writers Guild members.

These countries collect those foreign levies on behalf of any author. That doesn’t mean just Writers Guild authors. It means non-Writers Guild authors. It also means, frankly, people who write and direct porn. Yes, porn generates a ton of foreign levies.

So the Writers Guild has become a collection agency on behalf of both Writers Guild members and non-Writers Guild members, which has led to a lawsuit, I think more than one lawsuit, and those are still wending their way through the system.

**John:** Yes. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Question number eight. “Could you please discuss the new media residual that was gained in the last strike? Has it been a good deal for writers overall?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the feature side is easy. Is it a good deal? It’s better than what we had. We already had 1.2 percent of 100 percent for Internet rentals of movies. We got that in 2001.

In this last go-around, what they wanted to stick us with was 20 percent of 1.5 percent for Internet sales of movies. What we got was the equivalent of 40 percent of 1.5 percent for sales of movies. So we doubled the DVD rate for Internet sales.

Is that good for writers? Yeah. It’s twice as good as… Well, let’s put it this way. It’s twice as good as a terrible rate. So I don’t know what you’d call it, not great but not the worst thing ever?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the streaming and the media, that stuff gets crazy.

**John:** It does get crazy. And you also have to consider if you’re doubling that rate for DVDs, the price points are also potentially a lot lower, too. So it may be less money actually coming into your pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bunch of factors. The price point may be a lower. We don’t know, frankly, if Internet sales will ever even come close to what DVD sales used to be.

My big hope is that, frankly, rentals are the things that capture the wave of the future, because we get a bigger piece of that. Even though that’s a smaller number, if rentals happen consistently and frequently, that could be a big upside for us.

**John:** Yeah. I want rentals. Just as a consumer, I want rentals. I want that media should be available to me when I want to see it and I don’t have to worry about holding onto it or storing it or doing anything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I just want to be able to see the show I want to watch when I want to watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now for television, it gets pretty complicated and there’s actually a pretty good rate for television streaming and reuse over the Internet. However, some of it is then qualified by the fact that they do this thing called imputed value, where essentially we’re talking about $2,800 for a year of streaming new programs over the Internet. It gets complicated.

If you go to the Writers Guild website, I think they do a pretty decent breakdown of how that works.

**John:** Cool.

“Have you two ever received a check from Netflix or Hulu’s reuse of your work? Who is paying the residuals in this case to WGA?”

That’s exactly like HBO.

**Craig:** Yeah, same deal. We wouldn’t get a check from Netflix or Hulu. Netflix and Hulu pay money… They don’t deal with residuals at all. They pay fees to the studios for the right to purchase those DVDs that they send out in the red envelopes or the right to host them and resell them on their servers.

The companies get this gross amount of money. It’s attached to a movie and they give us a piece.

**John:** Yep. And now currently — I actually don’t know the answer to this question — let’s say Netflix buys a block of Sony movies and Go is one of those movies. Are they splitting the money equally between the movies that Sony is selling at that block or are they apportioning for each play of Go on Netflix’s servers?

**Craig:** Our deal is structured so that every time your movie is rented you get a piece of the gross that that movie generates. However, I don’t believe the companies are restricted from doing the kind of deal you’re talking about.

If they did the kind of deal you’re talking about, somehow they would have to figure out, in some sort of lump sum arrangement, how to apportion that money. Because obviously Go deserves a certain amount of money and Moneyball deserves a certain amount and an Adam Sandler movie deserves a certain amount, and they can’t just make it equal across the board. That’s where it gets crazy. I don’t really know.

And frankly, that’s why the next few negotiations are going to be so difficult because the truth is no one really knows how the stuff is going to work. We have to smash a very mature contract to pieces and make a new one based on the way the market’s changing.

**John:** Exactly.

“What makes you think that new technology…” It’s always a bad sign when a question starts “What makes you think that?”

[laughter]

“What makes you think that new technology won’t enable the studios to escalate their underpayment shenanigans?” That’s a loaded question. “If a television program or film is re-aired on cable, it’s pretty easy for the guild or writer to determine how many times it was re-aired and what his compensation should be. With new media, there is no publicly accessible way to see how many times an episode or film has been downloaded or streamed.”

Some of that’s a good point, some of that I would take exception to.

Yes, one of the nice things about traditional broadcast and cable is that you can see, “Oh, that show is on HBO right now so I will get a payment for that.” It’s harder when it’s split across a whole bunch of different platforms. You don’t know how many times it’s actually being played. That I totally get.

But I don’t know that you’re necessarily going to know what the numbers were behind the cable deal or TV deal at the start.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You don’t know how much they paid Sony for the rights to show that show on cable.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. The truth is, the part of the question that’s correct is the part that presumes that there are shenanigans. Absolutely there are shenanigans. They occur on a daily basis. The part that’s incorrect is presuming that it’s any more difficult to run those shenanigans with an old model than it is with the new.

What the guild has built into its contract along with the DGA and SAG AFTRA is the right to do something called a tri-guild audit, where the three guilds essentially force an audit of all of the signatory companies to check their books and to go through the accounting and make sure that we’re getting paid properly.

This is one of the great failings of the Writers Guild over the last 15 years, I would say. I don’t know the last time we actually imposed the tri-guild audit. That is part and parcel with the strange political culture at the guild that is fetish-ized appearance over results. We will go to strike to get a better rate on a deal that we aren’t checking.

I would much rather us spend the money to do these audits every year, and collect money that we are probably missing out on every year, as opposed to shutting the town down to try and improve our rate by some minuscule amount.

As I like to say, you can get 100 percent of nothing, it’s still nothing.

**John:** So, a true life example, here. For The Nines, we had to endure a motion picture television fund audit. And so, here’s how they audit an individual film: they came, we had to pull up all our boxes out of storage, and a guy sat at a table for two days solid with a laptop and went through every single file, checking everyone’s payroll, their time cards, and everything else like that. And at the end, gave us a bill for, like, $7,000 for underpayment on something.

Now, it was a pain in the butt for me. And it was kind of a pain in the butt for them. And we were able to negotiate it down, because there were disagreements about how some stuff was done, but they were enforcing their contract. They were making sure they were collecting every penny that they were owed, and that’s their job. And so, I would love to see a more aggressive tactic taken.

**Craig:** Yeah, and as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with three unions, each of which, maybe, have, I mean, for instance, the Writers Guild, I think it’s yearly income from dues and so forth, is somewhere in the 20 millions, you know, maybe 28 million dollars, let’s say.

28 million dollars isn’t an actual amount of money for, say, Fox. Does not exist, it doesn’t even compute. So, we’re talking about very small companies going into very large companies, and obviously, they’re going to resist these audits and do whatever they can. And, frankly, I think it should be job number one. I think we should be doing these audits, literally, it should be the most important thing we do. But, I’m not in charge.

**John:** No.

Question 11. “Are you aware of web only television series, such as Jane Espenson’s Husbands, or Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy?”

Why yes, I have. And I will put links to both of those on the show notes.

“For now, these seem to be passion side projects. But is it possible one day we will live in a cable-less world where there are thousands of shows online, all produced on a shoestring budget? Could it be, one day, that everyone will have their own show, but no one’s making much money?”

Again, that is not really a question we can answer, it’s really more a statement with a question at the end, not the answer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you’re asking me to prognosticate, I would say, no. And the reason why is, people who are very good at what they do want to be recognized for it, because they will be recognized for it. So, if one person that’s making this terrific show that hundreds of thousands of people tune into because it’s really, really cool, somebody else is going to come to them and say, “You know, you could make a ton of money on ads and stuff.” And suddenly, there’s budget and there’s ads and the cycle begins again.

We always reward; attention is a resource. We don’t just spread resources out willy-nilly. The marketplace will draw resources to the stuff that deserves it, generally speaking. So, no, I don’t think we’re going to live in a time when everything gets equal attention, that just goes against human nature.

**John:** Okay.

Question 12. “How do you see film marketing evolving in the new media era during the home video window? In the old days, a writer’s film would be sold to HBO, HBO has an interest in promoting it, so it runs a few ads during its other programs. The fact that it’s playing gets put into TV Guides, newspapers, and to cable set top boxes across the country.”

So, the question’s really asking, with new media, how do we maintain the profile of big movies across the different platforms, I think?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a little scary. And I mean, movies, the studios’ marketing divisions rely heavily on television. And if television becomes fragmented to the point where no one’s seeing anything, then they obviously lose a massive tool.

Now, I will say, and I like using the word massive tool, when I talk about marketing.

**John:** I knew you did that, yeah. I can see the little glee in your voice.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, those massive tools. And I did start in marketing, so.

But look, let’s face it: it’s already happened. So, instead of companies spending 100 percent of their budget on television spots on three networks, they spend 100 percent of their budget on television spots across 80 networks. And, theoretically, the cumulative eyeball factor adds up. But, of course, you see movie ads everywhere on the Internet, all over the web. And then, there’s outdoor. And outdoor, I actually think, is going to become more important over time, because you can’t escape outdoor.

**John:** Yeah. Motion pictures are one of those things that you need to have everybody there your opening week. Your opening week is so crucial, that we’re going to continue to spend a ton of money on network TV, because that’s the only way you can sort of make sure to reach everybody all at once. And, to the degree that stuff gets fragmented, you’ll just have to buy up all the little different places that they could be watching something, to do it.

This is, I think, in marketing, or in ad buying, called a “roadblock,” where you’re buying a commercial on every channel at the same time so that at 8 p.m. on Monday, you’re buying out all the channels, so that you make sure that everyone is seeing your ad.

And you can do the same thing on the Internet. It’s called the Internet roadblock, where you’re buying massive ads on the top 20 sites, so that you make sure that everyone has been exposed to your thing on the same day.

And you’ll see some of that sometimes with other product launches. Like when Apple has a brand new thing. You’ll see a roadblock where they basically, they’re buying out everything on the New York Times, or they’re buying out a major ad on New York Times and all the other newspaper sites, same day.

**Craig:** I will also mention this other thing that is going to get worse and worse. The one advantage that studios have over car companies or Apple is that they own most of the delivery systems. So, as obnoxious as it is, these local news stories that are really just ads for the stuff that the parent company of the local news station is producing, it’s going to get worse. No question.

You’re going to see characters on TV shows talking about upcoming movies. You’re going to see, it’s going to infect everything, because it is becoming harder and harder to reach a unified audience.

**John:** Yeah.

Question 13, finally. “Craig, my web browser is full of Hangover two DVD ads for the December 6th release.” —

**Craig:** — See? —

**John:** — “Presumably, a big residual day is coming up for you. How soon after a film’s release on DVD do you get your first check?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s a formula, I believe it’s something like the company has — I think — six months following the beginning of the first quarter in which they receive grosses. There’s some very complicated thing. But the short answer to your question, my guess is something like a half a year later.

**John:** Yeah. So, my prediction will be, you will see a spike, and that will be like, “Oh, that will be a big check.” It’ll be actually the second check you get is going to be the big one. Because you’ll see, like, “Oh, there’s a bunch of things sold,” and then the next one is bigger. Based on other, bigger movies that I’ve sold.

Like the first check for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was nice and big. Like, “Oh, wow, this should be great.” And the second one was, like, “Oh, twice as big. It should keep growing.” And then it goes and it crashes and it does the familiar sort of long tail thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of, I’m very curious to see what happens. That’s actually, the Hangover II DVD is an interesting case study, because it’s one of the first ones that’s really promoting this UltraViolet concept, where the studios are doing their own digital locker. And it’s also an interesting test case just to see, just to check the DVD market itself, because the first Hangover was extraordinarily successful on DVD and that was two years ago.

Granted, it’s a different movie, it’s a sequel, it may not even, apples to apples, it may have not done as well. But I’m kind of curious to see what the effect of the allegedly eroding DVD market is on the sales of this one.

**John:** Yeah, UltraViolet is stupid. I just don’t think it’s going to work. I think it’s a bad name. I just don’t get it at all.

**Craig:** It’s, you know what? I used to think that I understood this good name, bad name thing. But, man, I say Blu-ray now, and I thought that was the dumbest name I’d ever heard of in my life. But now, when I say it, it’s like a thing.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I didn’t like the name iPad, but now I can’t imagine them calling it anything else.

**Craig:** Well, everybody was “iPad, yeah, it’s tamponesque.” And yet, here we are, just like sheep.

**John:** Beyond the name, I just don’t think I want to trust these other new people to hold on to my media in any meaningful way. I mean, Apple, I get, I mean, Apple has reason, I believe Apple’s going to be around five years from now. I don’t know what UltraViolet is, I don’t know who those people are. It just feels too much like HDDVD or all those other things. It’s like, I’m waiting for the winner, and I just don’t feel like that’s going to be the winner.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Because the truth is, anybody, look, I save all my screenplays on my Dropbox account. I don’t know who the Dropbox people are, either. But, so, it’s not like, security wise, or will it still be there? It’ll always be there, it’s the studios, they own the movies anyway.

The real thing is, who the hell are — most people don’t know it’s the studios. And studios, what they’re good at making and selling isn’t this. What they’re good at making and selling are movies and TV shows. I don’t think they’ve done, as far as I could tell, a particularly good job of convincing people that UltraViolet is this great new idea. It’s great for us as writers, in terms of residuals, if it takes off. But this is all, this is a war between the studios and Apple.

**John:** Yeah. It basically is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, as we’re doing follow up, and some wrap up, too, we had a previous conversation about Follies, the great Steven Sondheim musical. So, two bits of exciting news that I think you’re going to be excited about. First off, the soundtrack to the Broadway production of Follies is now available on iTunes, and it’s great. It’s great. It’s actually really, really great.

Second off, and probably more exciting to you, Follies is coming to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Well, it looks like we should go.

**John:** We should totally go.

**Craig:** I’m going to make you go again.

**John:** We actually have season tickets to it, because this is actually going to be replacing Funny Girl, because Funny Girl was supposed to be coming to Broadway.

**Craig:** I can’t go see Funny Girl with you. It’s just too gay. Sorry.

**John:** It is, it’s too gay.

**Craig:** Too gay.

**John:** So, Funny Girl got nixed. It got, it fell apart.

**Craig:** Why, do you mean, fell apart? Just the, no one wanted it, or?

**John:** No, it’s actually, this was interesting, because it was while we were doing our second Big Fish reading, for our producers and investors and theater owners and stuff. It was that same week that we were in rehearsals, Funny Girl fell apart.

So, it was Lauren Ambrose and Bob Cannavale to star in the show, and it was originally, it was going to do its out of town at the Ahmanson, before traveling to New York, to Broadway, to open. And kind of at the last minute, it evaporated and fell apart. And so, the Ahmanson was left with this big hole, for like, “Oh my god, what are they going to do for their production now?” And they’re going to take Follies. It’s great.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Everyone loves Follies. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, I’m there.

**John:** Cool. And I think we’ll leave it at this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a lot of good follow up today.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and thank the great questions.

**John:** All right, absolutely. That was Daniel Barkeley, who did, really, the heavy lifting on today’s show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Daniel.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/screenwriting-gurus-and-so-called-experts).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** You are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, a weird thing happened this last week. I thought I would share this anecdote, this story about a thing that happened this past week. It’s dinner time and we’re sitting down to eat some good dinner and we hear a helicopter overhead, which is not that unusual in Los Angeles. We have a lot of helicopters in Los Angeles because we have a lot of news copters, we have police helicopters. It’s pretty common to hear some helicopters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then I noticed this helicopter is persisting. It’s like, “Oh, well that’s kind of unusual.” While this is my most favorite time of year because of all the great stuff that happens this time of year, I don’t like that it gets dark so early, so it’s quite dark out. I notice that the helicopter’s light is going on. So they’re looking for something or someone in this area, so it’s a police helicopter, not a news helicopter.

We go out front and there’s two police cars out in front of our house. Well that’s not great news. If you’re a single person, you have the option of freaking out because you can just freak out that there’s a police helicopters overhead and there’s police cars out front. But when you have a young child, you’ve given up the right to freak out about things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re going to mirror your anxiety.

**John:** Yeah. You have to just completely play it off like, “Oh, hey, how neat. There’s those policemen. Aren’t policemen great? Let’s talk about how wonderful policemen are while we’re locking the windows and locking the doors. Oh, you know what, I think I’m going to turn on the alarm now instead of late at night. Hey, that’s great. By the way, did we shut the gate? Yeah, everything seems to be pretty good.”

We’re trying to watch the police officers out front to see what’s going on and then I notice the helicopter overhead is circling around. The light just keeps going over the back of our house. They’re looking for something right here. This isn’t one of those things where they’re following somebody down the street. Literally something is happening right next to our house. It’s probably the house that’s under construction next door because houses that are under construction tend to invite problems because no one’s actually living there.

All this time I’m trying to keep really calm and not freak out the kid. Then I saw something that was actually kind of amazing. Police helicopters, the light is incredibly bright. It’s sort of like a second sun in the sky. Because it’s pretty low overhead, it’s casting these really cool shadows across the driveway. The silhouette of the trees is really cool. You see every little branch projected onto the driveway.

But what’s even cooler is helicopters, they have to circle a little bit and so the shadows of the tree branches keep sweeping across the driveway in this really, really cool way. It’s like one of those stop motion Vimeo things where they do those long exposure landscape things where you see all the stars going in circles across the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that but it’s happening right in front of you.

**Craig:** It’s Koyaanisqatsi in your front yard.

**John:** It’s basically that word I can’t say in my front yard.

**Craig:** [laughing] Right.

**John:** I bring my daughter over to see it. “Hey, this is really cool.” I can genuinely say this is a very cool moment that is happening despite the fact that there could be murders next door. By the way, I’m completely holding onto this idea. If you see the next movie I direct has helicopters that are projecting branches onto the ground, you’ll know where it came from. This was my Alan Ball plastic-bag-blowing-in-the-wind moment because it was just really, really beautiful.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is the moment you’ll bore thousands and thousands of people with.

**John:** Oh, completely.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** People will be talking about it, reverentially at first and then they’ll just hate the moment.

**Craig:** Then they’ll realize, wait a second, [laughing] it was a plastic bag. That’s great.

Alright, so the helicopter is circling. What happened, murder?

**John:** That’s the thing about all police activity that happens in a city like Los Angeles is you never really know what happens. The next day we find out that it probably was a break-in, somebody trying to steal power tools next door. No one was hurt, nothing bad happened. It’s just one of those things where someone saw that there was a construction site, waited until it was shut down and then broke in to try to steal all the power tools.

**Craig:** You know, I used to live not too far from where you live so we would get the helicopters all the time. In fact, I was probably a mile or two away from where most of the bad things happened, which meant that the helicopter often was right over my house because they’re shining the light at the center point of their circle. I’m on the edge, I’m on the circumference of their circle.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes they start talking to the people once they find them. Have you heard the helicopter guys talking?

**John:** I have yet to hear the helicopter people talking. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, they’ve got this massive loudspeaker on those helicopters. You just hear them giving very specific instructions. It’s so odd to just be sitting in your house and then you just hear this chopper noise and then, “The people on the roof, move to the ladder. No, the other way,” [laughing] this very casual conversation with the people on the roof.

I live in La Canada now, which is up against the mountains northwest of Pasadena. Our interesting thing was last night there was this amazing windstorm that brutalized Los Angeles. For whatever reason or function of geography, Pasadena and La Canada always get the worst of it. Last night was no exception. We had winds up to 95 miles an hour. My little thing for a movie is, I always like it when mundane things are slightly out of place because it’s more shocking, I think, than, I don’t know, just the sweeping shots of CGI devastation.

I’m driving back from my office — because we lost our power, I had to go to my office to work. I’m driving back on the highway and there’s a large oak tree in the highway just sitting there. Yeah, you don’t see that every day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of cool.

**John:** When I was in Boy Scouts, there was one time we had a winter campout. It was really windy while we were up in the mountains but we drove back into Boulder and the traffic lights were down. The traffic lights had been knocked down or bent around themselves by this huge windstorm that happened while we were gone. It was very much like coming back into a post-apocalyptic scene.

We got home and there was no power at home. I’d come from a weekend of cooking over a campfire to building a campfire in the fireplace so we could actually have heat.

**Craig:** It doesn’t take much to remind how fragile our little grasp on civilization is.

**John:** It is. One thing I should say in reference to my earlier story about the police helicopter is there’s a danger that in telling that story I’m contributing to the fallacy of misleading vividness, which is that by telling you this story of this police action that happened next door, a listener in Topeka might thing, “Oh my god, I could never move to Los Angeles because it’s so dangerous because I just heard this story of this police thing that happened right next door to this guy whose podcast you’re listening to.”

That would be a mistake because if you actually stop and think about that story, it’s that the police you could say overreacted a bit to sending two police cars and a helicopter to potentially someone stealing power tools next door. It was really a very minor thing that I just had a very big reaction to and it felt very cinematic but it was really not that big of a deal.

**Craig:** That’s right, you don’t know. Maybe it was a murderer next door or maybe it’s just that the Los Angeles Police Department has this enormous arsenal of tools, so they bring the sledgehammer out for everything.

**John:** Yeah. While we were talking I actually looked up — Wolfram|Alpha is a really good place to go if you want to look up crime rates for places. The crime rate for Los Angeles I know had fallen a lot. The crime rate for Los Angeles is actually lower than the national average. It is lower than the California average. It is lower than Pasadena.

**Craig:** I believe that. You’d have to figure out which parts of Pasadena you’re talking about because there are parts of Pasadena that are pretty rough. But in general, one of the strange things about our culture is that — there was an interesting study I read a couple years ago: The violent crime rate in the United States has been dropping precipitously, I think, since the early ’90s and we are now back to levels that we haven’t seen since, I think, the ’50s or early ’60s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yet at the same time the reportage of violent crime has skyrocketed. While we live in this relatively un-violent period of time, we tend to think we’re living in the most violent period of time.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But in fact, we don’t.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No, it’s pretty good out there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop complaining.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought we might start today by doing some follow-up on previous episodes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Our last episode was on residuals and there was one question which came up in the comments section which I thought was pretty good. Residuals: do they count towards maintaining your health insurance?

**Craig:** They do not, not for the Writers Guild. They do for the Directors Guild, and I think we mentioned this last time. The Directors Guild automatically lops off, I think, half of the residuals. It may be a little more complicated than that but let’s just say for the sake of argument roughly half. And they steer those residuals into the health fund. Thus, as a result of that, your residuals count as earned income towards qualification for health care.

The Writers Guild does not lop any of your residuals off for health care. The exchange that we make, however, is that our earned residuals do not qualify us towards health care, only writing income.

**John:** Yeah. If you write a movie which is produced and you are earning residuals for it but you don’t continue to write other movies, your health plan will run out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You will stop being qualified for health insurance.

**Craig:** Yes, whereas in the Directors Guild — actually I directed a movie and all of my income was within one calendar year, so obviously I qualified for health insurance for the following year, but then I qualified again because the residuals the following year were enough to get me another year.

**John:** A weird loophole that happened for me was I’m not a member of the Directors Guild, but for a year I had Directors Guild health insurance which happened because maybe you remember a couple of years ago, Heroes was a TV show on NBC that was a huge success originally. After the first season of Heroes they decided they were going to do obviously a second season but they were also going to do these origin episodes.

They went to a couple filmmakers to say, “Hey, would you direct these one-off episodes of Heroes Origins that are creating new characters that could be folded into the universe?” A couple of us said yes, and so Kevin Smith was supposed to do an episode. I was supposed to do an episode. And they made a deal for us to do this.

Then the air went out of the Heroes balloon and they decided not to do it, but the money they paid me, for whatever reason, counted towards DGA. I ended up having Directors Guild health insurance for a year.

**Craig:** When you do, what no one tells you is that obviously you qualify for Writers Guild health insurance. Then this other health insurance becomes your secondary insurance.

What they don’t tell you, and you have to kind of figure out yourself is, that secondary insurance works, but every time you get something back from the Writers Guild, you have to then send that form to the Directors’ Guild so that they can process it. It’s the worst. It’s a full-time job. I was actually happy to not have secondary insurance. It was killing me.

**John:** Yeah, it was kind of a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mess.

**John:** Yeah, we should talk about health insurance sometime. That’d be a good thing to talk about.

**Craig:** The Writers Guild health insurance, like every health insurance system, is absurdly complicated and it’s not their fault. Frankly, the more complicated it is, it’s usually because the better it is.

We have an excellent health care system, but there are a lot of weird little ins and outs and things that people don’t know. You’re right, it would be — I mean, listen: god knows we risk boring everyone to death every time we delve really deeply into this stuff. But, why not?

**John:** I’ve actually had mostly good experiences with the WGA health insurance people. But I had one very bad experience where we were adding my daughter to our health insurance. The woman on the other end of the phone said, “No, I need the adoption papers.”

“Well, you don’t understand, I didn’t adopt my daughter.”

It was like, “No, you have to adopt your daughter.”

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It was this bizarre thing where she just couldn’t quite process what our family situation was. I was like, “I really need to talk to your supervisor right now.” It got all resolved.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the question for you is, does the Writers Guild handle your specific situation relatively better or worse than, say, if you were with Aetna or an even more faceless massive bureaucracy. Because you obviously have a twist.

The other thing is that the same-sex couple rules are changing constantly, it seems to me, at least. They seem to be in flux, whereas, the traditional man/woman/kid situation is in stasis.

**John:** Yeah, I would say, overall, the WGA seems to be handling it as well as any place handles that stuff, so, I’m not particularly worried about it.

Another note follow up question here. We were talking about video games and getting union representation, WGA representation for video game writing. One of the readers wrote in and said, “Nobody in game development gives a rat’s ass about the writer. If anything, we’re viewed as an inconvenience to most game developers, a necessary evil, if you will. I predict you have something to say about that.”

**Craig:** I don’t really care if people in video game companies look down on writers. They can look down on anyone they want. The question is: Are those writers serving a role that makes it such that it’s hard to replace them if they all walk? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter.

Unions aren’t about making people like you. They’re about protecting your job, setting some basic parameters for what you ought to be paid, and how you should be acknowledged for the work you do.

**John:** Yeah. Where would you start with the video game people? Would you try to go after everyone who works at the video game company, or just people who are doing, who are putting words on paper, or on a screen?

**Craig:** Well, this is one area where I tend to veer a little bit off from a lot of the more hard-line organizing folks at the Writers Guild. There is a tendency to want to overreach with these things and suggest that we should represent everybody that is, quote unquote, “contributing to story.”

The problem with that is, producers contribute to story, actors contribute to story, directors certainly contribute to story. Story isn’t the functional aspect when we’re talking about employment contracts.

The functional aspect is literary material. Who is putting their fingers on the keyboard, typing in words and printing them out? That is writing that we can represent, as far as I’m concerned. It’s provable, it creates literary material. Literary material is something you can take a look at and credit and assign authorship to.

I would say, if, let’s say, we were talking about organizing Bethesda, who are the people that are writing stuff down? Those are the writers.

**John:** I want to get on to our main topic today. Now, Craig, a question I get a lot, and sometimes at panels or forums or other things is: What books should I read if I want to become a good screenwriter? Are there any really good manuals or how-to guides for screenwriters?

I never have a good answer, because the short answer is that I don’t have one that I should say you should absolutely read. The longer answer sort of make me sounds like a jerk, because I end up sort of espousing too much opinion about other people who write books about screenwriting.

What do you say when people ask you that?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look: Obviously, a big difference between you and me is I don’t care about sounding like a jerk. I just do it. I immediately go to answer number two.

I mean, okay, short answer number one. What book should I read? You can read any book you want. None of them will be as useful as reading screenplays and watching movies and thinking about story and then writing the script. That is the only basic instruction set that you need. And that works. The books are useless, I do believe.

**John:** Useless, though? I mean, I would — okay…

**Craig:** Useless. Because, look, we live in a time now where we have the Internet. Okay? If I need to know how long a script should be, if I need to know how it should be formatted, if I need to know what it’s supposed to look like, if I need to know how much description I should use and all. That stuff is out there, it’s on your website, it’s all over the place. There’s no need to buy anything.

**John:** But some stuff that you learn in books is not about…it’s not the simple answers to a question; it’s more — it gets you thinking a certain way about how to do stuff. If a book provides… I’m genuinely playing devil’s advocate here, because I do share a lot of opinions with you on this.

But I feel like there could be useful information in these books, and useful ways of thinking in these books for people who have never thought about story in a way before. It gets them really thinking about story, or thinking about how puzzle pieces might go together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. I still don’t know if that is as instructive as reading the screenplay to a movie you thought you knew well and seeing, in a kind of reverse engineering way, how it came from a script. Because that’s all we’re really doing, is kind of pre-engineering a movie when we write a script.

Look: There are some basic instructional guides that aren’t harmful to you. Syd Field isn’t harmful, I don’t think, unless you somehow view it as a religious choice. I don’t think that Chris Vogler’s book is harmful.

**John:** You think it’s not harmful.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s only harmful if people actually think that that’s the book that’s going to teach them how to be a screenwriter. It’s not. There is no such thing.

**John:** Okay. In research for this podcast, I looked up, and there are 2,123 books about screenwriting on Amazon. —

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** — It’s really a small subset of them are the ones that I think we often hear or talk about here. Certainly Syd Field is the one we have to talk about first. Syd Field, his famous book is called Screenplay. I didn’t, I had to look it up, because we don’t, we just call it the Syd Field.

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember when I was a kid in math class, that there were kids who wanted to understand basically why multiplication worked a certain way and grasp the concept behind it, and then there were kids that just wanted the 12-step algorithm, and just push it in one side and it comes out the other. It’s like a dumb box in between.

You can’t approach screenwriting that way. People who use these books to sort of try and reduce the process to something easy and controllable are failing. The only value, really, is what you’re saying, maybe plug into some common vocabulary and get a basic sense of the fundamental, most common shape of a screenplay.

Frankly, I would much prefer to see people go online and read a free public domain copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, which I think has more actual philosophical meat behind it about what the point and purpose of drama is, both good and bad.

**John:** I have to think about why there are so many people who aspire to be screenwriters and why there’s a market, apparently, for books about screenwriting. I think it’s because the form looks so different from everything else. The format scares people. Yet, it seems approachable in the way that everyone has seen a bunch of movies. Therefore — like, I get so frustrated when I hear people say, like, “Oh, I could never write a novel, but I think I could write a screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As if it’s like, “Oh well, it’s just people talking.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly why they do this, because everybody thinks, “I can write a screenplay, I have a great idea for a screenplay. I just need a book to tell me how to do it, and then I’ll do it. But I’ve already done it in my head. I’ve already done this hard part, which is to come up with this great idea for a movie. Now, I just need to shove it through this process and the Screenwriting for Dummies will tell me about that. That’s just window dressing.”

No, that is the screenwriting. Your idea is useless. Useless. The screenwriting is everything. The process is the job.

That’s why I find these books to be, essentially… They are sold in bad faith by people who, quite frankly, were they better at screenwriting, would be screenwriting.

**John:** That is a source of frustration for me as I look through the people who are selling these books, is that most of them have no significant, or, really, any screenwriting credits whatsoever. They are aspiring screenwriters who probably have written some screenplays but have never actually made movies from their screenplays.

An exception: Blake Snyder, who has the Save the Cat books, which I’ve not read, but people seem to like a lot, has done. He unfortunately passed away. But he has two genuine credits to his name — just really makes him an exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Everyone else has zero.

**Craig:** That’s right. We used to just have the plague of wannabes and pompous professors who insisted that they would give us the key to all this stuff. Now, we have this new scourge, which are underemployed readers.

For those who don’t know, because there’s so many scripts in contention at studios and production companies, the executives and gatekeepers hire people to read them, evaluate them, and score them. There’s a whole shadow industry of people that read and rate scripts.

Many of those people, I think, quite a few of whom don’t even want to be screenwriters, they want to be executives. Many of those people, faced with underemployment or lack of employment, begin to sell that service to others as a screenwriting consultant. Now they’re leveraging thousands of dollars out of people by reading their scripts and giving them so-called expert coverage. It’s atrocious.

**John:** And frustrating. I guess I come back to a question of, you know, I went to a university, I went to a film school. I went there to learn how to make movies. I had screenwriting classes. They were genuinely helpful. I’ve been a guest lecturer at screenwriting classes. I’m trying to in my head differentiate what that is versus what my frustration is with the guys and experts.

**Craig:** John, I have it. It’s — look, I just did, yesterday or two days ago, I guest spoke at Howard Rodman’s class at USC. I came there in good faith. You go to these things in good faith. And I think that for well-credentialed, respected academic programs, they’re offered in good faith.

So much of this is not. So much of this is simply a scam. You can smell it from a mile away. The truth of the matter is, there’s not much value in me reading some random person’s script, then giving them advice, because, almost always, they just don’t have it.

I want to be clear, and so, by the way, that would be in bad faith, especially if I took money, obviously. It’s about me.

I want to be clear, because a lot of times, people who are aspiring to be screenwriters feel that people like you or me are saying this stuff because we’re trying to keep them out, or hide the truth from them. Quite the opposite. I want more and better screenwriters. I want many, many screenwriters, better than I am, to come and make better movies than I make. Books aren’t going to make that happen. Talent is going to make that happen.

I really, more than anything, I’m actually trying to be very prosocial about this and say, “Please, save your money.” Screenwriting is free. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that by spending $3,000 you’re going to exercise a control that you so desperately want to have. I want that control, too. I don’t have it either. None of us do. Sorry.

**John:** One thing that occurs to me as we’re talking: While I didn’t honestly read a lot of the screenwriting books growing up, I have read a ton of programming books, because I love making apps, I enjoyed programming since I was a kid. I’m not especially great at it. I can do it, if push comes to shove. But I have real blind spots towards it. It’s not something that comes very naturally to me.

I’ll teach myself a language. I’ll teach myself Perl or Ruby or try to teach myself Objective-C, which just doesn’t fit my head very well. I can buy as many books as I want to buy, but I am searching for that book that says, like, “Oh, this is the magic formula for how you make any app.” And it’s like I said, I guess I’m guilty of that, too, is that I want there to be an easy way that just makes it all simple and possible. And it’s not.

You look at actual real programmers, Nima Yousefi, who does the programming for our stuff now, it’s just — it’s good and it’s natural for him. It’s just the work. He didn’t get to be good at it by reading a bunch of books about it. He got good at it by doing a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, the fabled 10,000 hours of doing something, it really does. I empathize with anybody who, faced with writing their 1st screenplay, or their 3rd or their 12th, who is seeking to be recognized for their work. I empathize with the pain and the fear that they have. Certainly, I empathize with their psychological craving for some kind of secret trick, control, leverage point, anything. It is a terrible drowning feeling when you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You desperately want to do it right.

It is discouraging to say to people, “There is no lifeguard on duty. The only way you will survive this drowning is by swimming through it.” But, unfortunately, there is no lifeguard on duty. These books will not help you. These people who charge you money will bleed you dry.

Think about this for a second. You are, let’s say, somebody who has a modicum of talent. But you’re raw. You are craving some assistance, some help. You spend money on a professional script consultant. They read your script.

They have a choice, they can say to you, “This is very far off the mark, you need to go write two or three more scripts and really figure out what this is about. Then, spend your money with me.” Or, they may say, “You have no talent, stop.”

Or they may say, “Wow, there’s great potential here. Here’s a bunch of notes,” that by the way, anybody could have given you. “They’ll make your script better. You go work on that, then come back, I’ll read it again, or I’ll read your other script, or I’ll read your third script. You’re the one. If only you, three or four more of my amazing sessions at $1,000 a pop and you’ll make it.”

They’re always going to do that, because it’s a scam. It’s a scam. Don’t do it.

**John:** We should probably differentiate between a couple things we’re talking about, here. I would come down on the side of, if somebody wants to read a book, it’s a small cost to reading a book. It’s going to cost you, now, $10, $15, and it’s going to cost several hours of your time. There’s the danger that it’s going to lead you in a very bad direction. But everything is a danger that’s going to lead you in a bad direction. It’s not a bigger gamble than anything else.

I would come down on the side of, “Hey, if the book seems interesting, go ahead and read it.” That’s basically what I’ve done with Stuart now, is that, Stuart is, you know, a young aspiring writer. As people ask questions, like, “Hey, is this a good screenwriting book?”

I would say, “Hey, Stuart, read this book and write a review for the site.” That’s what we’re doing with that.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Seminars, I am opposed to seminars. I am opposed to seminars where the masterful instructor comes in and teaches you how to write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, me, too, yeah.

**John:** Linda Seger’s known for them, Robert McKee is known for them.

**Craig:** Linda Seger. Linda Seger. Derek Haas was at some event and Linda Seeger was there speaking. She was peppering her speech with authoritative comments about how she assisted somebody who once wrote a Cagney and Lacey.

Good Lord. People are spending money? Why? Why? It’s crazy to me.

Listen, I completely agree with you on this. If all you lose is 80 bucks on six books, whoop-de-do. Go for it.

By the way, when it comes to… Look, there are books that I actually, I like recommending to people, because I don’t want to be a total jerk about it. I think, actually, rather than reading the Chris Vogler books, which are sort of a screenwriting view of Joseph Campbell’s work, just read Joseph Campbell.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re wonderful books to read anyway, just to understand the commonalities of human narrative. But I would certainly say, before you start spending even money on books, you should read John’s site, you should check out, god, there’s just a whole bunch of sites out there.

**John:** You should also read screenplays.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing you keep coming back to, is that, you need to read as many screenplays as you possibly can read. You need to read the great screenplays. You need to read the screenplays to the movies that you love to see how those movies were made.

But you also really need to read bad screenplays. People don’t take my word for this, but I was a reader for TriStar for a year, and for other places for six months before that. I read, and had to write coverage on 150 terrible screenplays. You learn so much about what never works by reading bad writing.

**Craig:** So true. Not just what doesn’t work, but also where it could have worked, but the writer wrote himself out of something good, because they overwrote or they underwrote. You know, good advice, read bad scripts.

I have a few, if people want to read them. [laughter]

**John:** I’m saying, fine on books if you find that helpful. Just make sure that you’re also reading scripts. No on seminars. No on paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just — if people can write in with comments if they’ve actually had a good experience where it has completely changed their…

**Craig:** They will. By the way, John, they will. They get so defensive. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who are so defensive, but in the end.

**John:** I want to see one produced writer —

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** — who can show me where they paid a script consultant and that’s what got them where they are.

**Craig:** Thank you, thank you. It’s very dispiriting to have to argue with somebody about why they’re wasting their money. It’s a little bit like, arguing with people who spend money on psychics. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead, spend your money. I don’t care. it’s not my problem.”

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I think that’s it. I mean, is there anymore to say about gurus or experts?

**Craig:** Ptheh.

**John:** Ptheh. Ptheh basically summarizes Craig Mazin’s position on that.

Well, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Very good.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-residuals-work).

Scriptnotes, episode 14: How residuals work

**John August:** Hello, my name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Crag Mazin.

**John:** And you’re listening to Episode 14 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is my second favorite time of year.

**Craig:** Hold on, did we discuss? Your first favorite time of year is when all the new fall shows are on.

**John:** Exactly. My second favorite time of year is, can you guess what?

**Craig:** Well, this is it, so it’s Thanksgiving.

**John:** No, it’s not the holidays at all. It’s the Academy Awards screeners.

**Craig:** Yes, of course. It’s screener time.

**John:** It’s screener time. For people who aren’t working in the film or television industry, this is the time of year when they show a lot of movies that hopefully will be getting awards come awards season. If you are a writer in the film or television industry, they will start sending you DVDs of the movies they want you to consider for award attention at the end of the year, or actually, after the end of the year.

Basically, the best movies of the year — or the movies that the studios want you to think are the best movies of the year — they will start sending you DVDs and hoping that you will play those DVDs and watch those movies and vote for those movies.

**Craig:** Right, which is kind of cool, because I don’t think anybody cares about the WGA Awards. When I say anybody, obviously we care about them, the people who make the movies care, and the studios, but the people at large, the audience, I don’t think are motivated to go to movies because something wins a WGA Award. I’m flattered that we get these things in the first place.

**John:** I think part of the reason why WGA membership is included is you want the overall buzz for your movie to increase. If a bunch of screenwriters are talking about your movie, that will hopefully convince other people who are voting for the more prestigious awards, like the Academy Awards, the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs.

[loud rustling from Craig’s side]

What are you doing to yourself there?

**Craig:** Thank you.

What I was doing to myself? That was the cleaning lady. The office cleaning lady came in, and I think we should keep this, because the thing is she’s really nice. The deal is that I’m sitting here at my desk, and I’ve got this microphone and headphones on, talking to a computer. All she hears is one side of the conversation.

I think she was already pretty convinced that I was insane, but now it’s like she’s literally going to go home and say, “There’s this one guy, I don’t know, he’s basically pretending he’s an astronaut or something, talking to his computer.” [laughter] You’ve got to keep this in, it’s great.

The thing is — this is such a digression — all she does is she comes in, I’ve got this office in this great old building in Pasadena. This woman comes in every day around this time to change the bag in my little trash can. I never have trash. I don’t make trash in my office, so she just comes in and changes an empty bag. There’s never anything in there, and yet often times she’ll come in, and she’ll hear me. Sometimes when I’m writing, I start doing the dialogue. She hears me talking to myself all the time. And now this.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s embarrassing.

Anyway, you were making an excellent point.

**John:** If we’re going to digress about offices, I’ll tell you my office story. Right now, I’m working at home, which is easy and great, so I can stumble into the kitchen any time I want. Before this, I had an office over in Koreatown. We were in this office building, and it was a perfectly fine office, and we also used it for pre-production and post-production on The Nines, so it was useful for that.

The building maintenance guy, the handyman who is sort of always around, was this guy named Oscar. It was a situation where there were shared bathrooms down the hall. I remember at one point going to the bathroom, and somebody must have been smoking in the bathroom — really smoking a lot in the bathroom.

It was uncomfortable to be in the bathroom. I found Oscar and I told him, “Somebody’s smoking in the bathroom, maybe you could figure that out. If you know who’s doing that, maybe you could stop them.” He really took it very seriously, “I’m going to figure out what happened.” Then two or three weeks later I walk into the bathroom, and he’s smoking in the bathroom. [laughter] It was Oscar. I just respect that he looked me right in the eye and he lied right to me that he was going to take care of the situation.

**Craig:** What did he do when he saw you looking at him? Did he just shrug and be like, “Yeah, that’s right?”

**John:** I didn’t see the cigarette lit in his hand. What it was, I walked into the bathroom at one point, and he was opening up this stall, and he had his pack of cigarettes and newspaper. Basically, he’d gone in there to do his morning business and have a smoke of a cigarette, and he had lied straight to my face.

**Craig:** I love it, I love it. I want people to also notice something if you wonder who the daddy of this podcast is. Wasn’t that you telling your story, and then saying, “What are you doing over there? You are making a noise while I am talking on my podcast!”

**John:** Yeah, there’s no way we’re going to be able to filter out all that stuff. I thought you were maybe changing into some sort of evening frock.

**Craig:** I am customarily. This is my changing time of day, where I do get into my evening wear, usually made of a Saran Wrap material.

I wish you could’ve seen the look on her face when she walked in.

**John:** And you have your personal valet who comes in to help dress you.

**Craig:** Yeah, totally.

**John:** Have we discussed Downtown Abby, by the way, talking about valets?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do you watch… You don’t watch any TV shows, so do you even know what Downtown Abby is?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Downtown Abby’s so good.

**Craig:** What is it, is it a BBC show?

**John:** Of course it’s a BBC show. It’s the best BBC show you could ever dream of. It’s like Upstairs Downstairs, and it takes place at this manor house, and you have the first season takes place at the very start, leading into World War I. The second takes place during World War I. It’s Upstairs Downstairs: you have the rich people, you have the servants, and it’s all amazing. It’s such a good show that after watching it the first season — which aired on PBS here, but we actually pulled it off of NetFlix — we had to watch the second season, but it was only in Britain. It was airing live in Britain, and it’s not going to come to the US until January.

We had a friend who was going to London anyway, so we gave her some money, and said, “Will you buy us an iTunes gift card while you’re there?” And with a British iTunes gift card, you can actually download Downtown Abby from the UK iTunes. I feel like it’s basically legal. You’re paying money for it.

**Craig:** It’s legal, of course. It’s just you’re jumping through some annoying hoops. I remember doing that with — there’s this wonderful Irish sitcom called Father Ted. I don’t know if you ever heard of Father Ted. Spectacularly funny show, and it was only on I think for two seasons maybe, because tragically the creator and star of the show died, very young.

My wife and I visited a friend of hers in Ireland, and she introduced us to the show and I loved it. I bought the videotapes, but they don’t play here, and I spent God knows how much money to convert them from PAL to NTSC, because this was — it was 1998 or something like that. It’s a great show.

**John:** Someone tried to remake Father Ted, I remember seeing that as a…

**Craig:** You can’t, because the show, it’s really sick and hysterical, but you have to be a Catholic country to even give a damn about what half the humor is about. Really funny show. This podcast is so far flung from — what were we talking about?

**John:** We were talking about screeners. This time of year, the studios hold screenings of the movies that they want you to vote for, but they also send you DVDs, and they will also send you printed scripts if you ask them to. Unless you beg them not to send you a printed script, they’ll send you a printed script. DVDs have started coming, and so far this year, we’ve gotten 21 DVDs, which is a pretty good haul.

**Craig:** That’s a serious haul. We get all the movies that you think we would get, but then we get some movies that are kind of popular fare, where they’re fishing.

**John:** I will quickly read through the list of what we’ve gotten, just so people know what movies we are talking about. Beginners, Bridesmaids, of course, Cars 2, Contagion, The Deck, The Guard. — What is The Guard?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** I see it on my list here, I don’t know what it is.

Hannah — I liked Hannah, but Hannah, I barely remember that it was this year.

**Craig:** It’s not going to win anything, but cool.

**John:** I can’t really see it winning something. I liked her a lot.

**Craig:** It’s a good movie, I just don’t think it’s an award movie.

**John:** The Help, which is an obvious choice. Higher Ground, which I don’t recognize at all. Jane Eyre, which I liked a lot and sort of got overlooked. Midnight in Paris, sure, of course. Pariah, which is a Sundance movie that I worked on at the Sundance Labs, which is great. The script is great, I haven’t seen the final movie, but the movie doesn’t come out until Christmas Day, so they’re already sending it out. It’s one of those movies where they basically know that it has to get a lot of critical acclaim and attention or else no one’s going to go see it.

**Craig:** It’s kind of cool that you get to see it before it’s in theaters.

**John:** Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

**Craig:** Good luck.

**John:** Yeah, maybe it’s a visual effects thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. I don’t think screeners are going to help, if you haven’t seen it by now.

**John:** The Skin I Live in, the Pedro Almodovar movie. Take Shelter, no idea what that is. Tree of Life.

**Craig:** Tree of Life, I saw that.

**John:** Which I don’t really want to see on a small screen, but I didn’t see it when it was out on the big screen, so I’ll try to get to a screening of it. Warrior, which I know a lot of people liked. Winnie the Pooh, which we watched, which is really, really sweet, and really, really young. Just super young. I take it you have not seen this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I haven’t seen it.

**John:** Your kids are too old for the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re past Winnie the Pooh.

**John:** What’s so odd about it is the storybook itself is kind of illustrated, so the characters will walk across the printed words, or the letters will fall into a hole, and they’ll climb up the letters to climb out of a hole. It’s actually a very clever way of doing it. The movie’s like 50 minutes long — it is super short.

Gnomeo and Juliet. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, always a good choice, and J. Edgar was the most recent one to come.

**Craig:** I don’t know where The Hangover 2 screeners are. They must be lost in the mail, I guess.

**John:** There will be screeners, won’t there be screeners?

**Craig:** I don’t think so, I don’t think so. No one gives awards to sequels anyway.

**John:** Sent one out for Cars 2.

**Craig:** I don’t think they should have done that.

**John:** I’m not sure they should have done that either. We were talking about how there’s so many animated movies this year that are going to be up for contention. I wonder if this is going to be the year that Pixar’s not one of the movies in the animation category.

**Craig:** That’s actually a great question, because Cars 2 is their least well received film. There is a lot of other competition, the other studios seem to be raising their game.

**John:** Craig, when you get… I should explain again to listeners. The studios will send you a card saying, “Please verify your address, because we’re going to start sending you screeners.” You’re supposed to, for the Oscar screeners, they actually make you photocopy your Oscar card, and send that back in.

I don’t think they make you do that for WGA. They’ll ask you a lot of times as a tick mark, do you want DVD or Blu-Ray? A couple of years ago there was a big deal about each of the screeners was individually watermarked, and there was all this storm. Now they just send you stuff by FedEx, and they ask you to sign for it, and I guess they figure that’s good enough.

**Craig:** Yeah, I have a feeling that a lot of the security that surrounds these screeners has less to do with actual concerns about piracy than it does with maintaining a certain consistency in appearance about of being concerned about piracy.

**John:** Yeah, it’s security theater.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. They really need to say, they are deeply, deeply panicked over piracy, and for good reason. By the time we get these screeners, the piracy has occurred. You’re right, it’s security theater.

**John:** The topic of DVDs coming to us is a good segue to our main topic for today, which is how residuals work. This is a good screenwriting or film industry 201 class. It’s not simple, but it’s not that difficult either, and I think it’s often very misunderstood.

I was at a WGA thing just last week, and another screenwriter said — we were talking about the Big Fish musical, and he’s like, “You’ll get royalties, just like we get residuals?”

I’m like, “Yes, and I understand why people want to think of residuals like royalties, but they’re really not the same thing.” They’re like royalties only in the sense that you’re getting paid down the road for work that you did earlier, but the actual way they work is vastly different than how royalties traditionally work.

**Craig:** They’re cousins, but they’re not the same.

Residuals exist because we don’t have copyright. When you do have copyright, one of the rights that you have is to be compensated for reuse of your work. You write a book, that book is republished, and when it is duplicated, you are compensated for all those duplications. When you write a play, and it is performed each time, that is a reuse of your work. In this regard, you are compensated fairly for the continual exploitation of your intellectual property.

As screenwriters, we don’t own intellectual property; we are employees. The studios own the copyright. How are we to be reimbursed for the reuse and continued exploitation of the work we create? Enter residuals, which were negotiated many years ago.

**John:** I actually looked this up, so do you want to hear the years?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure.

**John:** I think the crucial framing for this is that residuals are only talking about the aftermarkets. They are never talking about the first use of something.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So if you are writing a television show, that first time it airs on network television, or in some cases the first window in which it airs on network television, is considered the first use. You’re not paid residuals for that.

For a movie that you wrote for movie theaters, its first run in movie theaters or really any run in movie theaters is its first use. You are not getting residuals on that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Back in the old days, that is all there were. There weren’t residuals, because there weren’t aftermarkets. Basically movies showed in theaters, so they didn’t show anywhere else. TV was, once upon a time, just a live medium. It wasn’t rebroadcast later on.

Residuals first came up in TV, because you could rebroadcast something. So, 1953 was the first residuals for reuse of major television stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was limited to five payments. Only the first five times it re-aired were you paid something again. 1960 was the first residuals for reuse of theatrical motion pictures, what we call movies on free television. So, if you wrote that James Bond movie and it played on ABC, you were paid a residual. That was the first time that happened.

1971 was the first residuals for home video. Pay television and all of the other things that are like that, for both theatrical and for television. A lot of times, when we think about residuals, we really are thinking about DVDs and videotapes and things that people buy, even though showings on TV are often as lucrative, or even more important than the things that people buy at the store.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah. That’s all correct. The only interesting addition is that, for feature films, for whatever reason, exhibition on planes has always been considered part of the primary release of a movie. So we don’t get residuals for exhibitions on planes. I don’t know why.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe did they originally have projectors on planes and that was partly how they did it?

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** Or did it happen so close to the theatrical window that it was considered part of that?

**Craig:** It’s possible. I can’t imagine that planes were lugging around projector systems. But you never know. It’s interesting. I’ll ask one of our monks at the Guild why that came to be.

But certainly for motion pictures, the big residual base for us is pay and free TV. So, when they rerun our movies on network television or free cable television or pay cable television or home video, which used to be VHS. Then, when the VHS market gave way to DVD, it became DVD.

Now, as the DVD market gives way to online rentals and online purchases, that. That is all considered home video. Home video, since a very contentious negotiation in 1984, has been the battleground in residuals between our Union and the Company’s for going on 30 years now.

**John:** Yeah. So, before we get into the numbers, we should talk about who gets residuals. You get residuals if you are the credited writer on a movie that was written under a WGA contract.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Crucial to understanding this is that animation is not covered by the WGA. So Frankenweenie or Corpse Bride or Titan AE, the writer of those movies — me — I don’t get residuals on those. That would be awesome if I got residuals on those, because those end up selling a lot of DVDs.

**Craig:** That’s right. Not one Pixar movie has ever paid a dime to the writers in residuals, even though they have accrued many, many multiples of billions of dollars. It is unfair. I want to actually talk about why it is unfair for a second, because that ties into the whole point of residuals.

Residuals are not profit-sharing. They’re not designed to be something where the writer gets paid off in success the way that you hear about actors sometimes getting first dollar gross or back end deals or a percentage of the profit.

Residuals are designed to compensate us for, in part, the arrangement by which we don’t maintain copyright over the material we write. They are designed to compensate us for the reuse of our authorship. It doesn’t matter if the movie was a bomb at the box office.

If you keep printing DVDs, and people keep buying them, our authorship must be compensated for reuse. It’s not for the labor that we did. It’s not for the hard work. But for the reuse. That’s why it is, to me, a bedrock principle for any professional screenwriter to attempt to get payment for reuse. Unfortunately, in the world of animation, it doesn’t happen.

**John:** There are frontiers at which some people are getting WGA residuals for things that are kind of like animation, like motion capture for example. Some motion capture films have been written under WGA contracts and people really have got residuals.

I don’t know for a fact that Tin Tin is WGA. But I feel like it could be, because I know some of the Zemeckis movies have been.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. mo-cap is a battleground. That is something that we know that, in concert with the Screen Actors Guild, we are going to be fighting over, in the either the next negotiation or negotiations to come.

Obviously studios would love to see mo-cap be exempt and considered animation and thus the purview of IATSE, which does not procure residuals for its employees. We are going to see what happens.

**John:** This is a bit of a digression, but when we say residuals are something that writers get, we are not the only people that get residuals.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Directors get residuals. Actors get residuals.

Isn’t it true that at least one of the other below the line unions, residuals kick into some part of their pension fund or something?

**Craig:** It in the Directors Guild, the director gets residuals. The way the Directors Guild works is that half the residuals that come to the Directors Guild for their members get apportioned off into the health fund. The rest are distributed amongst their members as opposed to the Writers Guild, where we get all of the residuals that come to the Guild.

In the Directors Guild, the Directors get the lion’s share of residuals. But a certain amount of residuals are also apportioned out to first ADs, second ADs and Unit Production Managers.

**John:** It does make it a little bit murkier, that sense that residuals are something to acknowledge copyright and authorship. It’s a use of that term for something that isn’t quite what we are talking about here.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not for the DGA. Look, that was their decision to make. But, for the Writers Guild I think it is very much a question of authorship, which is why you qualify for residuals if you get credit. Because our credits signify authorship.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. So we should say that if you share credit on a movie, you end up sharing residuals. There is a formula for how that all works. So, if it is an even split between two writers on written by, they will share that 50-50.

Story credit is granted 25%. So, if you have got sole story, but shared screenplay, you get 25% plus half of the 75%. I’m not going to try that math here on the air. But it is a straight formula.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. It’s also important to note that sometimes there isn’t a story credit, because it’s an adaptation. In those cases, the same amount of money still comes in. It’s just it all gets apportioned to the screenplay credits. Written by signifies a combination of story and screenplay.

**John:** Exactly. So, there are two kinds of residuals. We are mostly talking in the feature world. So one kind is moot. But, as I was looking up and doing some research for this, there are fixed residuals and there are revenue-based residuals.

Fixed residuals or something that kick in much more in television. So, as you write an episode of a television show, and then years later it rebroadcasts on Fox at five in the afternoon again and again and again, you get paid a flat fee for that. Am I saying that correctly?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You get paid a flat fee based on that it was a show of this length. It aired on these markets and that’s how much you are getting paid.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those residual rates in television, the flat residual rates are actually based on the minimums scale. That’s why every three years, when we negotiate our contract, we always seem to be really vested in getting a 3% bump, or in this last one, a 2% bump I think, or 2 1/2%.

You think, “Well who cares if we are getting an increase in scale, because none of us get paid scale?” Well, it sets the residual rate for TV writers. That’s why it matters.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not an insignificant amount. If you got sole credit on a one-hour show that was rebroadcast later, your residual could be $20,000.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now, that is a little bit of a unicorn. It used to be, back in the day, when you and I would watch the networks unleash their fall campaign ads, there were a lot of network reruns. The network would run a show in prime time and then maybe a month later he would say that show pop up again.

Networks rarely do that now. They rarely rerun those shows. So even though the highest form of residual for television is I believe is a true network rerun, they just don’t happen.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s kind of a bummer.

**John:** Yeah. But we get more television. So that’s good.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Yeah. For the users, it’s actually probably better.

**Craig:** Yeah, for the viewers it’s better.

**John:** Movies only have one fixed residual that I can think of or find. It’s relatively new and called the script publication fee.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** So if you write the feature film, the studio basically will pay you $5,000, which is theoretically so that they can include the script of the film, the screenplay of the movie, on a DVD. It’s sort of a gimme.

One weird thing and one separate right that we do hold onto is the screenwriter has the right to publish the screenplay. So they are basically pre-buying the right to publish that screenplay.

**Craig:** On the DVD, which they never do.

**John:** On the DVD.

**Craig:** What happens, and this comes down to the kabuki theater of labor management negotiations — I believe that came out of 2001; I may be wrong about that, I think it is 2001 — out of that negotiation, basically we were asking for a bump in in-home video for theatrical.

They were saying, “We are not touching this formula. We are not going to budge an inch.” So, we came up with this creative way to just tack on another $5,000 for everybody. It is such baloney. The language is baloney. The money is real.

**John:** It’s a check. It comes.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a check. It comes. Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. It’s actually one of the first checks you get for residuals, because they know what it is and they send it to you.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** So, we were talking. Those aren’t the only kinds of fixed residuals that you’re dealing with. So television has a lot of fixed residuals. Features only have that one fixed residual, the script publication fee.

Most of what feature writers are talking about are revenue base residuals. Basically you get a percentage of whatever the distributor’s gross is in those aftermarkets. So, it’s not the distributor’s gross of film rentals. We’re not talking about the money that is coming out of the box office at the theater.

We are talking about the money that they are making off of DVDs and iTunes sales and the sales they are doing through ABC and every place else.

**Craig:** And iTunes rentals as well. Yeah.

**John:** iTunes rentals, yeah. So those formulas are slightly different percentages. But 1.2% is the best way to think about it. 1.2% for…

**Craig:** Well, not really.

**John:** Talk to me Craig.

**Craig:** Well, it was 1.2%. That was sort of the number. Then, in 1984, the Writers Guild noticed that it wasn’t collecting 1.2% of the gross receipts that the companies were getting for VHS sales. They were getting 1/5 of that.

So they called up and said, “You have made an accounting error.” The company said, “No, we haven’t. See, we have this thing now, where we have decided that the 1.2% actually applies to what we call producers gross. Producers gross is 20% of the actual gross. So we are not giving you 1.2% of 100%. We are giving you 1.2% of 20%.”

In the rest of the world, that’s called getting screwed. You’re not getting 1.2%. You are getting .3%.

Did I do that math right? I think I did.

**John:** You did. Yeah.

**Craig:** So, long story short, we went on strike. We lost. We went on strike again in 1988. We lost. We have fought this battle over the decades. The formulas remain unchanged for DVD and VHS.

We essentially get .3%, roughly. It escalates at a certain point. But minorly. .3% of the gross. Now, that means if you go to Best Buy — and you’re that guy that is still buying DVDs at Best Buy, so you are my grandma — let’s say they sell them to you for $15.

Best Buy keeps a chunk of that money. Then the rest goes back to the studio. That is the gross that we get .3% of. Someone worked it out roughly to be a nickel a sale.

**John:** Yeah. So, technically my 1.2% is accurate, in terms of the terms of the contract? But it’s not accurate in terms of what studios are actually taking back?

**Craig:** Well, they enshrine that 20% language in the contract. Unfortunately, we got stuck. Now, an interesting thing happened in 2001.

In 2001, I don’t know if anybody remembers, but we almost went on strike. This was when John Wells was President. I think the first go around. There were a lot of big issues at the time, trying to get Fox to treat writers like they were an actual network instead of a fledgling network and all the rest of it.

But we got this little interesting thing out of there that I don’t think anybody realized was such a big deal at the time. We got the companies to agree to pay a full 1.2% — not .3%, but a full 1.2% — of Internet rentals.

Now, in 2001, when that deal was made, the iPod had yet to be introduced. There was no iTunes. Nobody rented movies on the Internet. So this was a remarkable bit of foresight by John Wells and our then Executive Director, John McLean, to extract that deal.

In the ensuing years, the companies realize that they blew it on that one. They refused to make a deal on sales. They said, “Okay, fine. You caught us with our pants down on this 1.2% for rentals. But for sales, we want to stick with that .3%. So, if you are going to buy something over the Internet, we just want to give you .3%.” That was essentially the biggest issue. That’s called electronic sell through. That is the biggest issue that led into our last strike.

**John:** Yeah, the Internet was always what the headline was for the strike. It was like, “Oh, how are we going to do it with the Internet,” and you always heard about web series, but it’s really sell through and rentals. It’s how people are going to be buying their movies in the next decade.

**Craig:** Yeah, and streaming for television shows. The television side is actually very complicated, because there are so many ways to deliver television shows, and it’s often difficult to calculate revenue. Is it ad supported or not ad supported? Does somebody buy a subscription to a site that then streams lots? It gets tough.

For movies, it’s actually very easy. You’re selling units or you’re renting units, how much per unit do we give? I remember sitting down with John Wells in 2005, this is two years before the strike. I said, “Look, they’re saying .2 or .3, rather, we’re saying 1.2 for sales. Where is this going to end up, in the middle?”

He thought that’s oftentimes where these things end up. In fact, after a very long strike, that’s where we ended up, pretty much in the middle. For electronic sales, it is .6 and change, and again with escalators for an electronic sale.

We do very well on rentals, iTunes rentals, we do great. iTunes sales, we do twice as good as we used to do on DVDs. DVDs, we still take it in the shorts.

**John:** Yeah, we do, but DVDs are going away.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re going away. The scary thing for us as writers is unlike the last iteration of the extinction cycle, where DVDs eliminated VHS and then some, Internet hasn’t quite replaced DVD in terms of grosses. The studios are not making as much money per movie as the used to, at least not through downloads and rentals yet, over the Internet. They’re panicked because they see this enormous cash cow fading, and they don’t see the Internet quite booming the way they would have hoped. But it’s also new.

**John:** It’s new. Here’s the difference that I saw: VHS tapes, they were priced fairly high, and eventually they brought the price down. They were able to introduce DVDs at really, a pretty high price point, given how little they cost to make, an individual DVD. It cost them less to make a DVD than it was to make a VHS tape.

The form factor of DVDs, people liked collecting them, and people wanted to have big collections of DVDs. People would go out and buy all these things, and studios could go back and reissue old movies on DVD, or new box sets of things that were slightly remastered. They could keep churning their old library titles again and again and again on DVD. People loved it.

I don’t see that you’re going to be able to do the same kind of thing with digital downloads, especially because they want to sell ultraviolet or other ways that you have a film locker, you could hold on to things. I as a user don’t really want to hold on to things, I just want to be able to watch whatever movie I want to watch whenever I want to watch it, and it’s challenging to find a business model that makes sense for everybody across the board that makes that possible.

**Craig:** That’s kind of the secret, hidden, possibly good news here. You’re right, the age of possessing media is over. We have transitioned, some people dragging, kicking and screaming, but so be it. We have transitioned into an era where media is defined by our access to it, not by our possession of it. When it comes to movies and television shows, if we decide we want to watch something, we just want to be able to click a button and watch it. Since the technology is available, why shouldn’t we?

The good news is that’s a rental model. We do well on rentals. It’s also for the studios, the upside is there are literally no physical costs, beyond a bunch of servers. If they could get their acts together and create their own distribution for this, they don’t have to print materials, boxes, CDs, they don’t have to pay for shipping, and they don’t have to handle the returns, the destruction of the old copies or any of that stuff. The question is whether or not people will actually be trained to do this as opposed to whatever else, watching something else because they don’t want to.

**John:** Right now, looking at the on demand streaming through places like Hulu or Netflix. To me, what I see as the challenge when figuring out our residuals is Netflix or Hulu, they’re making block deals for a bunch of titles from a studio. There’s no guarantee that you as the writer are going to be nicely apportioned for that block of movies they ended up licensing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the other thing. I don’t know how the studios handle that accounting. They have to in some way or another, because you’re right, if you write a big hit movie, you don’t want to split things evenly with movies that were duds.

That’s a challenge, and the other challenge is that we haven’t quite gotten to that place where the way the iPod essentially saved the music business and created that business model. We haven’t gotten there yet. We need the iPod of TV, we need whatever Steve Jobs is cooking up, or was cooking up, I should say, before he passed away.

The sort of Apple TV device that allows people to look at their big 60-inch screen in their home theater, and then through that screen, quickly buy a movie that plays right there and then and is stored right there and then, because that’s what we need.

Right now, I think it’s easy enough to go on iTunes and rent a movie. I actually don’t think people like watching movies on computers or on their iPads, frankly. I think they really want to watch them in their house, on their big TVs. Why not? They paid for them. If we get there, let’s see what happens.

**John:** While we’re getting there, let’s talk a little bit about the practicalities of residuals, and what that means to individual screenwriters. Residuals get paid out every quarter. If you write a movie for Sony, Sony will send you a check. They actually send a check to the WGA, and the WGA forwards the check to you for the amount of residuals that you’re owed.

If you have just one movie with a studio, it’s just the one check that comes. If you have a bunch of movies that are through a studio, like I had Charlie’s Angels and the second Charlie’s Angels and Big Fish, those all get lumped together. You can’t actually figure how much came from each movie until you go online and sort it all out.

Those checks come to your home or to your office, but it’s more fun if they come to your home. They come in a green envelope that’s a very unique color. Whenever you’re going through your mail, “Oh my God, I’ve got a green envelope.” Then the fun comes in trying to guess how much the check is for. You open up the envelope carefully so you can see which company it is, or which title it is, and then you guess based on your recent history how much you think that residual check will be for, and it can be for a lot more than you thought.

I picked Go because it was a movie that I’ve had residual checks for the longest, and I think was illustrative of why residuals matter. I can talk you through Go, and I’ll just give you the real numbers on Go.

Go was a movie I wrote in ’96, the movie came out in 1999. All in, I was paid about $70,000 for Go, that was them buying the rights to the script, and me rewriting the script and production and everything else, I was paid about $70,000. The movie was moderately successful, it made about $17 million in box office. The budget was $5.5 million, so nobody was really losing money, but with advertising, they had probably… they weren’t really making money theatrically on the movie.

My first residual check for Go came in November 1999, it was for $36,000. That’s a lot of money, that’s duties, sales, probably was on a run on HBO at that point. That was great, that’s DVDs sold. Checks keep coming. I remember Rawson Thurber, my old assistant. When he wrote Dodgeball, he called me after Dodgeball came out. He was like, “I just got a residual check for Dodgeball, it’s so great, I didn’t realize these things would come!” I was like, “Rawson, you know they’re going to keep coming. They come every quarter.” He had no idea, it was Christmas for him.

The checks keep coming on a movie, and so my most recent check for go was in August 2011. It was for $1,863. A lot less, but still money.

**Craig:** That’s the life cycle of these things.

**John:** Exactly, there’s a long tail, it tapers down. The lowest I got for a quarter, I just looked it up, was November 2007, I got a check for Go for $428, which is still money.

**Craig:** It’s money.

**John:** It’s money, it is actual money. I pulled up from the WGA site, and I totaled up all the Go of it all. It actually ends up being serious money. All together for go, $337,000.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s a great example, because the movie wasn’t a juggernaut at the box office, it was a little film, but it had a life on video, it had a life on cable, and I assume it has a renewed life online. The point is you authored it, and you should get that money.

By the way, let’s also point something else out, because I like to reverse engineer these things. You made, what did you say, $370,000?

**John:** Yeah, $337,000.

**Craig:** Perfect, let’s just say $350. You made $350. Do the math, that is somewhere between .3 and one percent, depending on what the formulas were, and how it ran and all the rest of it. Let’s also point out how much the company has made for using that.

**John:** I came into this podcast having reversed the math at 1.2 percent, but that was really the wrong figure. My number for what they made is going to be too low. At 1.2 percent, they made $28 million.

**Craig:** They made more than that.

**John:** They made a lot more than that.

**Craig:** They made a lot more than that, and then you realize just how much money a movie can make, because a lot of movies can break even at the box office, then the rest of it. And what’s the expense, what is the overhead? This thing exists permanently and requires no maintenance. It doesn’t have to be cleaned, it doesn’t have to be fed. It just sits there and is duplicated as you need it.

**John:** The reason why wanted to put some real numbers on that is we end up talking about these esoteric things, like is it .3 percent or is it 1.2 percent, and it actually does genuinely matter. The reason why we go on strike, whether it was the right choice to go on strike or not, the reason why we fight for these things, $337,000 is a lot of money.

I’ve been lucky to be able to write other movies since that time, but if I hadn’t written, haven’t been successful in the time since then, that would be money that I would really, really need. It matters for everybody who actually gets a movie made.

Some questions that would come up, I think people were asking questions, so let’s get to them right now.

If you die, what happens to your residuals?

**Craig:** I believe that they are assigned to your survivor and your estate, as it were.

**John:** Exactly, they really are an ongoing asset. They do persist, it’s not one of those things like a health insurance thing. It’s not that kind of benefit that just goes away, it’s only while you’re alive. It does keep going on.

People ask, “Do you pay taxes on residuals?” Yes, you pay taxes on residuals, they’re income.

**Craig:** You also pay dues on your residuals.

**John:** You do, you pay your 1.5 percent. I think WGA already takes those out before they send it to you.

**Craig:** That’s right, when you get the little statement, they just ask you what your writing income is? Then you fill that out, you send it back to them, they send you back a bill with the calculation of that, plus they’re filing your residuals along since they’re collecting them.

**John:** Do you pay your agent or your manager commissions on residuals?

**Craig:** You do not.

**John:** You do not.

**Craig:** You do not, and for excellent reason, even though agents will bitch and moan about this incessantly. Very simple reason: they didn’t negotiate it, the Writers Guild did, so why should they get any percentage of it?

**John:** They shouldn’t get anything, they did nothing.

**Craig:** No, I deny them their money.

**John:** Anything more we need to wrap up about residuals?

**Craig:** I would just say to tie back to something you kind of hinted at there, in addition to the kind of intellectual justification for why we receive residuals, there is a sort of a moral one as well, residuals do help keep a lot of writers going in between these jobs that we do. This is not always a steady business.

When the companies attack our residual base, they are making it once again very hard for professional writing to be a sustainable career. If I could speak to them now, I would say, “Hey guys, keep in mind that you can’t starve your labor force to the point where they can’t actually bounce back and write another great script.”

You need people to stick with it, even if they have one or two years where they’re off, or they can’t find it, or they’re just not writing the stuff you want. Residuals are what keep people going, so it’s mission critical that we maintain those, fight for those, and seek to improve them every three years. There we go.

**John:** Great, thank you so much for this talk on residuals.

**Craig:** Thank you, and of course, thanks to our fine cleaning lady.

**John:** She does excellent work.

**Craig:** I’m sure right now she’s at home, staring at her husband, saying, “There’s the weirdest white guy. There’s no one there, he’s talking into a fake microphone.”

**John:** Yeah, it’s going to happen. All right, thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Talk to you next time.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/undervalued-simplicity-and-wga-coverage-for-videogames).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** You are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you are sick aren’t you?

**Craig:** I am sick. I have got the late November virus.

**John:** Is it a cold? How would you describe your illness?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s definitely a cold. I am one of those… [clears throat] people. I am going to do this throughout the podcast, please forgive me.

**John:** Yeah, I am going to have Stuart go through and cut out every cough. It would seem like —

**Craig:** [coughs]

He’s not going to cut out that one, is he? [laughs]

Sorry. I am one of those people that rolls their eyes whenever someone says “Oh, I have the flu.” You don’t have the flu. You have a regular virus. You just have an upper respiratory infection, 99 times out of a 100. I think we have covered this before.

**John:** Yeah. I had a bit of a cold situation two nights ago, where it was one of those things where you can feel your body starting to… like my skin, I could just feel something strange about it. I will always know if I have a cold because if I try to take a shower, the water just feels really weird on my skin.

**Craig:** That is weird.

**John:** So I had that happen. I am not crazy. You have had the same thing, right?

**Craig:** I have not had that, I must admit. Not even in the worst illness have I ever experienced any kind of… I don’t know what you would call that.

**John:** Oh, whenever I get a cold I can always tell like the cold is coming on because like my skin just feels a little bit different. It’s not the surface of my skin, it’s like a few millimeters underneath my skin feels wrong and different.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So anyway, I had that. The cure for that cold, just in case anyone is curious, is Maker’s Mark. Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey is how you fix that. So I broke out the bottle and had a little Maker’s Mark and now I am fine.

**Craig:** That is essentially what Nyquil is. It’s just Maker’s Mark with a decongestant.

**John:** It’s cherry flavored Maker’s Mark.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So other than being sick, have you had an okay day?

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty good. I have got a script due out in a few weeks, so I have been cranking pretty hard. On Friday, by the time you get to Friday if you have been doing a good steady five page clip a day, you kind of start feeling a little bit like a melted chunk of ice or a puddle of disintegrated brain goo. So I am excited that it’s Friday.

**John:** You get that candy-bar-in-the-car quality.

**Craig:** Yeah, kind of soft, damaged.

**John:** I did no writing at all today. So here’s my day, since we were talking about people’s workflows. I started today with a meeting with Todd Strauss-Schulson, who is a director who did the Harold and Kumar movie, which I loved.

**Craig:** The most recent one?

**John:** Yeah, the most recent one.

**Craig:** Alright.

**John:** It was great. So I had followed his short films that he made before this and this was a chance to sit down and have coffee with him. So when people talk about like “Oh, what is a general meeting?” That is a general meeting. We weren’t talking about any specific project down the pipe, just like “Hey, who are you” and “Let’s get to know each other a little bit.”

So I had that coffee. I had a meeting at the WGA to talk about… Every year, or every two years, they try to do a survey of working screenwriters to figure out what the big issues are. So this was a test run on the survey for what this next survey is going to be so that they can ask all of the feature screenwriters what the issues are about late payments and sweepstakes pitching.

This writer, Craig Mazin, was originally supposed to be there but he didn’t make it.

**Craig:** Yeah, he didn’t show up because he was writing and coughing.

**John:** He was a candy bar melting in the car.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s always encouraging to be sitting down and looking at the issues ahead. Also nice to be able to think about the issues ahead without having to think about how to fix them because so many of those creative issues are really intractable. We are not going to wave a magic wand and suddenly fix sweepstakes pitching.

**Craig:** Yeah, unfortunately, most of the things that they ask about and get responses on are sort of evergreen problems. So we keep asking what are the problems and screenwriters keep saying “This, this and this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a little frustrating. At some point the survey itself almost becomes this weirdly mocking thing.

**John:** Yes, this is self-fulfilling prophecy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s potentially interesting about getting the data on this is that you can maybe start to recognize what studios and what mini-majors are the worst at some of these things and possibly you can effect some change based on the report card aspect of that.

So if studio X is notorious for bringing in 20 writers on a project that they don’t ever end up even making, then maybe that could be more publicly disseminated and people will know to not go in for every one of those crazy sweepstakes pitching situations.

**Craig:** Well, that would be nice. Unfortunately, I think the way that the business is right now and the economy and the level of development that is going on, writers will go in on those sweepstakes pitches. I wish they wouldn’t, but I can’t tell them not to. I certainly can’t judge anybody who needs a job who is trying to get a job. They are not illegal.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They are just obnoxious. I would argue counterproductive. To me, the way to get studios off of that is to just make a compelling argument that the scripts will be worse because of them. I could make that argument, I just don’t know if they agree or care.

**John:** Yeah, because you are never going to be able to show that the script was worse because of it because you can’t fork the universe and show the two different development paths you took, one of which you brought in like eight writers to try to beat something out and one which you just hired the best writer who showed up.

**Craig:** That’s right. You can’t actually prove it. But the primary argument that I make about these things is when you force writers to jump through that many hoops in that kind of gladiator-style audition for work, you can be assured that when you do choose a writer and that person sits down to work, they are spending half their time working on your script and the other half doing the exact same thing they had to do for you for someone else to get the next job.

**John:** Exactly. You create a culture in which writers are only giving partial attention to the project in front of them because they have to keep looking for that next job, because the process has been drawn out for so long.

**Craig:** Exactly. I get why they do what they do. But the truth is between that factor of bifurcating the attention of the writer, the other factor is frankly, there is really no demonstrable connection in my mind between who does the best song and dance in the room and who is going to actually write the best script.

If you find somebody that you trust who has a good track record and you believe in them and they have a basically good take on it, that should be enough. But hey, I don’t run a studio.

**John:** One day, but not now.

**Craig:** One day. [laughs] God forbid.

**John:** So the rest of my day, jumping ahead, was spent working on, we suddenly have a Macintosh app that we are going to be releasing fairly soon. We were working on a different app which we will get to eventually. But along the way, there’s something I actually did for the Big Fish musical that I said “Hey Nima, we should be able to do this, right? I am not crazy. This is actually a pretty easily solvable problem.” Of course two days later he had it figured out.

**Craig:** That guy is a genius.

**John:** It’s because Nima’s a genius. Nima Yousefi, he is a listener and a friend of the show. So Nima worked on this thing and it looks like, “Hey, it’s actually really great and useful, and actually a much more useful app for many people than what we were originally working on.” Which brings me to a larger issue that came up a couple of times since last two weeks, is that this most recent project was actually really easy. It kind of feels like too easy. It feels like you are cheating because it’s just actually too simple.

In a weird way I think we undervalue things that come to us really easily because we have been through so many times where it’s been a struggle and conversely we overvalue those things. A better example might be for the Big Fish musical, we have been working on it for years and years and years. So there is maybe 20 songs. Not all of them are singing songs, but there’s 20 pieces of music. Some of them we have gone through like 14 different versions and drafts of them, like classically the “I Want” song, where the character sings about what he or she really wants. That’s the one we keep going to again and again. Or the opening number will be something we go to again and again.

There is one number that everyone loves in the show. But literally Andrew and I — it was late in an afternoon and we just banged it out three years ago. It kind of feels like cheating because we know we have worked so hard on every one else — on every other number — but that one just clicked and it was right and it was simple.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a frustrating thing, frankly, that your success as a creative person isn’t as simple as work in, quality out. It just doesn’t work that way. You are right. It kind of violates our weirdly Calvinistic work a day ethic.

I frankly am guilty of… You know there are days when you sit down, and suddenly you have this great run. Five pages pour out of you and they are really good and you feel great about it. Then you think “Well, I am not going to work the rest of the day.” You feel guilty. Whereas I feel curiously proud of myself if I beat my brain into a mush to get three pages out over the course of the day because they were really hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s kind of dumb, frankly. I should stop doing that.

**John:** Yeah, you should stop doing that because one of the other dangers, I think, is that those pages that were really hard to write, you are overvaluing how good they are because you know how hard they were to write. If they are only even kind of okay, you are more reluctant to change them because you know how hard they were to write. Sometimes you are willing to throw a perfectly good scene under the bus because you just dashed it off. But you are not really aware of the actual quality of the scene. You are so keyed into how much work you put into it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that is right. I think directors get that better than anybody because you could go out and direct a scene for three days at night in the cold and it’s dangerous work and it was brutal to even get it up on its feet and you argued to get the money for it. You could pile on an enormous amount of circumstances. Then if you watch the movie and it needs to be cut, you cut it out. That is a good lesson. You are right, just because you poured in a ton of effort doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

**John:** There’s a few of my movies, Corpse Bride was a pretty quick work but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was sort of famously, was really three and a half weeks to get to my first draft. It was like “Oh, that wasn’t enough work.” I felt kind of guilty turning it in, but it was done. It was ready and they needed to shoot the movie. Most of the scenes I never went back and touched again. So you compare that situation and that movie was really successful to other movies that I have killed myself on that were either never shot or they were shot and they were a difficult process the whole time through.

You don’t know. I think you should probably just celebrate the times that they have worked out great rather than killing yourself on the times where it was a slog.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Let’s give ourselves a break.

**John:** Yup. Let’s also answer some questions because I…

**Craig:** Yes. I have got my question list right here.

**John:** I was in New York for two weeks and was away from the actual question bag. So a lot of stuff stacked up here.

So let me get to the first one here. Shannon, in Tucson asks, “I am a man with the name Shannon.”

**Craig:** Ha-ha. [laughs]

**John:** “As you may imagine, this has caused me some difficulties and embarrassing moments. I have come to think that choosing a different first name, I am thinking Andrew, would solve the problem. Is this a good reason to choose a pseudonym, or am I overreacting about my name?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, Shannon, it’s a personal thing. If it’s uncomfortable for you and awkward, then yeah why not change your name. It’s your name. It’s who you are. I had a friend in high school named Kevin Zeidenberg. Kevin’s mom was Filipino and his dad was Jewish. Kevin looked pretty Filipino. So he would get that look, the “you are not what I expected when I heard the name Kevin Zeidenberg.” I think some people sort of relish that slightly Ricky Gervais-style awkward moment and some people don’t. It’s your name; it’s your career. If you want to change it, do it.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. Pick a new first name, use your initials, whatever you want to do. It’s absolutely fine. As people who would look me up on Wikipedia would know, August is not my original last name. You knew that, right?

**Craig:** I did. Your original last name was… [laughs] sorry, I was going to make a joke that would get us kicked off of iTunes.

**John:** Yeah, that would not be good. It was a Germanic last name and really tough to pronounce and simple to look at, like “Oh, I could say that.” Then you actually try to say it like “Oh, wait. I don’t know what my vowel sounds are in this name.” So I recognized as I came through, having this name my entire life up through college that the first 15 seconds of any new conversation with somebody would always be about correcting how they mispronounced my name.

So I was doing myself a favor and everybody I would meet in the future a favor if I would just pick a simpler last name. So I just picked my dad’s middle name and it’s been cake since then. I legally changed it.

You don’t have to legally change your first name to use a pseudonym, but it just became easier for me to do that before I moved out to Los Angeles and started a new life. It’s made running from the police much simpler.

**Craig:** So much simpler.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, good point.

I have a question for you.

**John:** Alright.

**Craig:** This is coming from… do we say their names?

**John:** Yeah, we do.

**Craig:** Yeah like Shannon, we can talk about Shannons, we can say this because this is Mike Amass.

Question: “To flip the coin on the helpful Movie Money episode of our podcast, would you like to air your thoughts on the current state of self-distribution. John, I know you watch the team behind One too Many Mornings, and might still be entertaining the notion of self-distribution for future personal projects. Could you shed any light on how filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Edward Burns are enjoying total freedom, total freedom, John, to create and maybe, just maybe, might be making some decent money at it?”

**John:** Yeah, I have seen this question, I racked my brain to think of who is actually doing this now. So Kevin Smith, clearly with Red State, which is a movie he made, I think, basically on his own money. Then he famously took it to Sundance, and then obviously wasn’t going to really sell it, he was going to self-distribute it.

Edward Burns, we were on a panel with Edward Burns, weren’t we?

**Craig:** In Austin, two years ago.

**John:** I had to sit next to Edward Burns, and he’s a handsome man. You don’t feel uglier then when you are sitting next to Edward Burns.

**Craig:** He is dreamy.

**John:** He is dreamy. See, objectively dreamy, and a really nice guy. He made a movie called Nice Guy Johnny, which I saw, which was good and really, really small. It has the stakes of a postage stamp, but really charming, and sort of the way he made it at a really small budget, and made exactly the movie he wanted to make.

Then the Polish Brothers, who I was on a panel with many years ago, and they have done many and bigger movies, but they did a tiny movie called For Lovers Only, which was sort of a fantasy of the kind of movies they do. They just traveled around France and shot in black and white with this beautiful actress. It looked good. I saw the trailer, I haven’t seen the movie yet.

There are some directors who are doing this, and hopefully some of them are making money. You are sort of vertically integrating yourself, so rather than going to someone to give you money, you are raising the money yourself. Rather than going to a distributor and signing over most of your future income on something, you are doing all that work yourself.

It’s a tremendous amount of work, so a movie like The Nines, I guess we could have self-distributed it, but then you have to become a master of all these things you don’t really want to have to know about, like how you book theaters, and how you collect money from theaters, which is really hard.

Because how are you going to get the money back out of the theater? You are just counting on their goodwill to report honestly and give you the money that you are owed? The advantage a distributor has is they have the next movie. If you are not paying them for the previous one, they are not going to give you the next one. You have nothing else to pull that money out down the road.

I think iTunes is one of the better ways to think about doing it. With The Remnants, which was a web series pilot that I shot a few years ago, we got the rights back to it, and we had some discussion about doing it as a teeny, tiny feature. Who knows, at some point we might still do it. I discussed with the people at iTunes what that business model is, and what cut we get, and how we could make that all work out. Also, had a conversation with Hulu about it.

There is probably ways it could work, it’s a little bit easier if you have some name and reputation, like Kevin Smith, Edward Burns, the Polish Brothers, so you could have a little bit of leverage with the distributors, the online distributors, and that you can actually generate press. That is one of the challenges you always have with an independent film, is like how are you going to get mainstream media to pay enough attention that people are actually going to find your movie?

I would have enough of that now that I could probably do it, so it’s something I am really thinking about doing. It’s just it ends up being a tremendous amount of time and effort that may not have the best payoff and reward. You may not be able to put it in front of as many people’s eyeballs as you really hope.

**Craig:** Absolutely correct, a big, uphill battle there. I should also add, I think that when Mike suggests that Kevin Smith and Edward Burns are enjoying total freedom to create. I would argue that they have less creative freedom than Gore Verbinski had on the last Pirates movie, because the biggest restriction on creative freedom is money. When you are stuck with a micro-budget, you really are squeezed. Sometimes wonderful movies come out of that because it requires tremendous discipline. But it’s a mistake to think that there’s more creative freedom with less money. It’s just a different set of problems.

**John:** I will push back a little bit on that. I think creative freedom doesn’t mean that you get to do anything you possibly ever want. Creative freedom isn’t anything you can possibly imagine you can make. To me, creative freedom is no one is going to tell you no. With a smaller budget, even on The Nines, which wasn’t as small a budget as some of these things were, I did have a lot of creative freedom, because we were fewer people around to tell me no on things.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** When something wasn’t possible because we didn’t have the money, it was always, “Then how is the movie changing to accommodate our actual limitations?” I didn’t have to change anything to meet someone else’s taste.

**Craig:** You chose to make a movie that would fit within the preexisting constraints of your budget.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** That’s why, Mike uses the phrase “total freedom to create.” Really, I am just quibbling with the word total, and nothing else.

**John:** Yeah. I see your point now. Total freedom to create versus total creative freedom, slightly different things.

Let’s move on to Daniel from Oakland. He asks, “My brother claims that studios don’t like to see a film do better overseas, because they see less of a cut overall than if a film does better locally, in the US. Is there any truth to this?”

**Craig:** I don’t think so, unless a studio is splitting the domestic and foreign distribution with another entity. I don’t see why they would be particularly concerned. There are quite a few movies that do better overseas than here. In fact, this year, the best example I can think of is Kung Fu Panda 2, which underperformed at the domestic box office, but was an absolute blockbuster overseas.

Another great example is in fact the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean 4, which also underperformed here, but was even bigger overseas, it was unreal overseas. I think in the case of Pirates, Disney has a domestic distribution arm, and an international distribution arm, in Buena Vista Pictures International, sees a huge cut of that money. I don’t know, maybe I am wrong.

**John:** I would imagine in the past, probably, that could have been more of a case, where they had a harder time pulling the money back in from overseas markets. That is possibly like, once upon a time that was actually true, but now it’s actually not as true, because given that the bulk of big movies’ money comes from overseas, I am sure they have gotten much, much better at pulling that money back in.

I will say that psychologically, I think the executive at whatever studio in Culver City, would kind of prefer that the movie making a ton of money here, just because people pay attention to that. Feeling like you have a big hit is better than having a movie that underperforms.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s absolutely true. There is kind of a weird stigma about a movie that is soft here, but plays big overseas. It’s got almost an underlying xenophobia, like, “Your movie was for people that don’t even speak English.” [laughs] People that didn’t get the prior intent of the movie because it’s all color and noise, or something like that.

Look, there are other examples of movies that do extreme splits, pro-domestic and anti-overseas, and that’s also damaging. Talladega Nights comes to mind. I think it made $100 million here, and literally something like $12 million in the rest of the world.

**John:** Yeah, the thing was that it doesn’t translate, or it doesn’t travel. That can also be the case, and it was the knock against African-American actors for a long time, until Will Smith came along and broke all those barriers too, is that the Eddie Murphy comedies would do really well here, but overseas, people wouldn’t go see them. That seems to be something of the past now.

**Craig:** Seems like it, yeah. Here is a question for you from Tom. “A number of movies have made it to Broadway, and I understand Big Fish will as well. As the writer of a screenplay, what do you ask for to keep you in the mix should your script move on to the stage?”

**John:** Here’s the messed up thing about writing a Broadway show that is based on a movie, is the screenwriter of the movie has zero claim or stake to anything in his or her script. Just nothing, because the studio is considered the author of the screenplay, and that is one of those separated rights that we are not holding on to in the ways you might hope that we could hold on to. Separated rights, actually holds the story, that’s part of the whole mess.

The truth of Big Fish is that if Sony had wanted to make a musical of Big Fish, they could have gone to any other writer they wanted to, that writer could have taken any words from my script, and put them into the Broadway musical, and used them without paying me a cent, and without my name being anywhere on it, it is kind of messed up. With Big Fish, it was honestly me grabbing hold, and saying, “I really want to make this musical,” and having to get the rights back from Sony, and having to get Daniel Wallace’s book reattached, so that we could do it.

As the screenwriter, you have very little hold on the Broadway musical version of your movie, unless it’s an original screenplay that you have the retained story credit.

**Craig:** Yeah if it’s an original screenplay where you retain story credit, or if it’s an adaptation where the story of the movie was unique, to the extent that they awarded you Screen Story by.

**John:** In retrospect, I should have tried to get screen story credit on Big Fish, because if you actually compare the book to the movie, they are so different in so many ways that I suspect I probably could have gotten it.

**Craig:** Right, it sounds like you did a workaround anyway, so that’s good.

**John:** Yeah, next question. Adam asks, “As someone who wants to write/pitch comedies, what value do you place on being funny during meetings? I am not referring to acting out hilarious scenes/characters, but perhaps an anecdotal story or joke interspersed to help build rapport. In other words, how do you try to sell your own comedic brand with the expected level of professionalism?”

**Craig:** I don’t like this question very much. Look, here’s the thing. If you are funny, you are funny, and if you are not, you are not. This question, forgive me Adam, it sounds like the kind of question a not funny person asks, because you shouldn’t be trying or calculating any of that.

The idea of a pitch meeting is there’s two parts. There is the meet, where you are actually pitching the movie, and you are correct to suggesting that acting out “hilarious scenes” and characters is a tricky thing to do. The other part is just you, talking to the people who will employ you, and giving them a sense of the kind of person you are, and what it will be like to work with you, and what you think funny is, and the quality of your wit, or lack thereof.

You can’t calculate that, you shouldn’t even be thinking about calculating it. Just be yourself, and if you are a funny person, let that come through. If you are not, probably shouldn’t be working in comedy. Sorry, I hate to be a bummer.

**John:** [laughs] I can understand his concern, it’s that when you go in to pitch a story, and you are trying to tell a story that you think is funny, you really want to have laughter come back, but studio executives don’t laugh a lot. They are not hysterically entertained people. You will hear stories of like, “Oh my God, there was this hysterical pitch, and everyone was laughing. People were crying, they were laughing so hard.” That is more the exception than the rule. You want people at least nodding and smiling, and acknowledging, “Oh, I see why that would be funny.”

**Craig:** Yeah, the thing is I like being funny just in the regular I am myself, and let’s just chit chat and be funny. That’s great. When it comes to actually pitching a movie, typically what they will say is, “Look, we know that you are a funny writer, we have read your scripts. What we are interested in is what’s the story, what are the characters, what is the theme, what are the ideas behind it?” In that regard, it’s a little bit like pitching a drama.

You are not required to do vaudeville or standup for them, because like you said, they are frankly not that interested. It’s like you are talking to somebody who represents standup comedians. They have heard it, they get it. [laughs] Just act like you have been there.

**John:** Yeah. Good advice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, in the lead up to the show you had said that something you wanted to talk about was videogames, because you are kind of a connoisseur of videogames, especially now, it feels like everything came out at the same time.

**Craig:** It is that season. It’s the holiday season, and they dropped the big, the big, big, big ones. We had two huge ones come out within a week of each other.

**John:** You are talking about Scribblenauts for iPad, right?

**Craig:** [laughs] I am talking about Scribblenauts for iPad, which has moved $14 billion worth of app money. No, I am not talking about Scribblenauts. I am talking about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, both of which pulled in nearly Avatar-sized grosses within a week of their initial release. They are absolute monsters out there right now.

**John:** Here’s where I am aware that I don’t watch all that much real television, because I have seen enough Modern Warfare commercials and billboards and stuff that I have some sense of what it is. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but you get to play Jonah Hill. So, can I play Jonah Hill and can I pull a grenade and just like sit on it?

**Craig:** I, I don’t…

**John:** Watching the commercials, that’s what I am getting is I get to be actually Jonah Hill and I could run into a line of fire if I chose to?

**Craig:** You can absolutely, yes, sit on a grenade if you want. You can sacrifice yourself. I mean…

**John:** But, can I be Jonah Hill while we are doing it?

**Craig:** You mean, actually be Jonah Hill?

**John:** I want to see Jonah.

[laughter]

**John:** Can I have Jonah Hill die frequently in front of me? That’s really my goal.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** That’s what I feel like I have been promised in your commercials is…

**Craig:** You can’t.

**John:** …I can be like the guy from Avatar or I can be Jonah Hill.

**Craig:** You cannot be Jonah Hill. There’s only one Jonah Hill.

**John:** Because I don’t play any of the sports games but like Madden Football, you get to play like a famous athlete, right?

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea there, yes, in Modern Warfare you are playing some grizzled secret Black Ops dude.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. In Skyrim you are an elf.

**John:** And in Skyrim you are an elf. So, you said you wanted to talk about that. I heard the name but it’s just like I thought it was like the new James Bond movie. I didn’t know what is Skyrim. I thought it was bizarre so I finally found the trailer. It looks great.

**Craig:** It is great. It’s pretty cool, and this is something that I have been kind of on about. I am getting a little wonky guilt here for the end of the podcast. This is something I have been talking about for literally five years. Our union…let me back up for a second and talk about what it means to be a militant. There’s this understanding that militants are the people that go out there and fight the companies hard to win gains and moderate are the people that just sort of talk and, maybe, get the crumbs off the table.

**John:** So, the moderates are the Scribblenauts and the militants are the Modern Warfare.

**Craig:** Correct, exactly. I have often been viewed as a Scribblenaut. [laughs] The truth of the matter is I think that I am, in fact, a real moderate…I am sorry, a real militant. I am a militant in the sense that if I see an opening where I think fighting will work, I want to fight. I think that the people we call militants in the union, sort of the Patrick Verone wing, are not actually militants, they are really suicide bombers because they just throw themselves at stuff that we can’t win at all.

They talk about sort of the glory of incinerating themselves for the cause. But as you and I both know, suicide bombers don’t ever achieve anything other than spraying themselves over a street.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, here is where we have been a suicide bomber. In organizing, we have gone after such impenetrable suicide bombing targets like American Idol or feature animation. Why are those impenetrable? Because American Idol, one can make an argument that there is writing going on, but one can also make an argument that there isn’t writing going on.

It’s basically Ryan Seacrest chatting with judges and then people sing. Somebody, producers are nudging it towards narrative but it’s a fuzzy case. In animation, obviously, animation is written but there’s another union that already has jurisdiction over it. That’s IATSE, I-A-T-S-E, and the Animation Guild 839.

So, these are suicide bomb targets, pointless. What is not a suicide bomb target are videogames, particularly videogames that are made here in the United States.

There are some huge videogame companies that are not U.S. companies and we can’t really get jurisdiction over people that aren’t working here in the U.S. It’s just a federal labor law. So, Enix I think and Squaresoft and Ubisoft, these are all big overseas companies. But, ZeniMax and Bethesda, the companies that make Skyrim, that is an American company.

They are in Maryland, in fact, and Skyrim and the Elder scrolls before it, Oblivion, are the most obviously written videogames ever because they are based on quests. You meet characters. They have storylines that they present to you with dialog. Let me go one step further. The videogame contains hundreds of readable books that the videogame writers wrote. It’s so obviously written, and I have been talking about this for a while. I just feel like…

Okay, here’s what kills me: Skyrim just made, it just grossed in one week, I believe, $700 million worldwide. That’s in a week.

**John:** Yes, a lot of money.

**Craig:** A ton of money. The writers of the game have no credit protection. They have no residuals or income from reuse. I don’t know if they get healthcare. I don’t know if they get pension. Most importantly, I just don’t know who they are. I feel like that is a great target for the guild to try and organize, same thing with Infinity Ward which makes the Call of Duty series, same deal.

**John:** Yes. I can tell that, particularly the videogames, to me that feel like they are actually movies. You look at the Sony one I never forget, the Naughty Dog, one they also just released, the one that will actually play this Christmas because I have a break, Uncharted.

**Craig:** Uncharted, that is a very narrative videogame, yes.

**John:** Yes. I mean, it deliberately feels exactly like a movie. There are movie people who are writing that. So, it feels like that is the kind of situation where you should be able to get some people protected. Yes.

**Craig:** Frankly, what does it cost? We go to Bethesda. By the way, I believe Les Moonves sits on the board of ZeniMax. It’s not like we don’t have these sort of pre-existing relationships. We go to them and say, “Listen, we want to organize your shop. As is our right by federal law, we want to be able to talk to the employees and let them know about the union and have them take a vote.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, in the end what’s it going to cost that company? Are they really going to get a huge chunk removed from their $700 million of gross proceeds in the first week? Hell no, hell no. But, you don’t see us trying, and you don’t see us trying because we are repeatedly distracted by nonsense and suicide bomb targets. I really wish we would stop.

**John:** I am here with you.

**Craig:** We rant. I love it.

**John:** We rant. So, what is the next step? So, the next step is to find…

**Craig:** The next step would be for the guild to open its sleepy eye and say, “Okay, we are actually going to assign an organizing effort to this.” We would have to talk to the Writers Guild East and do it jointly with them, I suspect. Then the next step would be to actually reach out to those writers, visit the company, sit down, see if we can’t come to an agreement ahead of time if the writers are so interested, and help to find that process and to find some credits for them and get a contract in place.

Rather than doing it sort of game by game, Bethesda and ZeniMax and Infinity Ward are shops. They make a lot of games. They make incredibly successful games that are clearly written. So, let’s organize those shops.

**John:** Do you go in with, “This is the contract we would like to see” or do you go in with like, “We will figure this out but this is…” Basically, do you already figure out what exactly you want these people to be getting?

**Craig:** No. First, what you have to do is get the employees to essentially agree to allow the Writers Guild to become their collective bargaining agent. Once you have gotten to that point, essentially, it becomes a union shop. Then, the next step is to negotiate a contract.

**John:** How do you distinguish out between people who are doing writing work and people who are doing producing work?

**Craig:** Well, in the case of what we do, it’s very simple. The test is we create literary material. I would argue that it should be the exact same thing for these videogames. Are you putting words down on paper?

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** If you are putting words down on paper that are being used to make moving images on a screen in the case of these videogames, we clearly have the capacity to cover you and define your work. Nobody else is. It should be us.

**John:** I am for it, I am for it. Done.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Resolved.

**Craig:** Resolved. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Mostly this podcast we are just talking about stuff. But, here, like clearly we fixed this whole system and we paid money for the guild. We paid health and pension for videogame people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, I feel really good about myself right now.

**John:** You absolutely should. So, Craig, I am not going to be able to play all these videogames. So, which videogame should I play?

**Craig:** Because I know you, I am going to tell you, you should play Skyrim and you should be aware that I have just given you a small little piece of crack for free. If you like it, come back and get more.

**John:** Because you know I had a World of Warcraft problem that actually I had to like stop cold turkey.

**Craig:** Here is the thing: This has everything that World of Warcraft has in terms of…the stuff you liked about World of Warcraft is here. But, it’s not endless. Really what it is is probably 200 or 300 quest lines that crop up and interact, some of which are very involved, some of which are one offs.

So you get pulled through this thing because, essentially, it’s combining your love of videogames and, maybe, your love of fantasy with a writer’s need to know how the narrative ends. So, right now, I have, I don’t know, maybe, 15 active quests or more. It’s killing me because I wonder how they all end but I can only do one at a time.

**John:** Yes. See, I was banking my fantasy videogame jones for Diablo III which is going to be coming eventually from Blizzard.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s in beta testing now. But, I would say the advantage of Skyrim…are we playing on X-Box or PS3 or what is it?

**Craig:** I am playing on the X-Box but it’s available for PC or PS3 as well.

**John:** Okay. So, the advantage to these games is that it wouldn’t be on the main computer, so therefore, I would know that I am not writing because I would know that I am not sitting on my chair at that computer.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, no question. We have a little out building on my property where it’s like a little rec roomy kind of thing that’s sort of standing.

**John:** It’s where you keep the Gimp, right?

**Craig:** It’s where I keep the Gimp, occasionally, when, yes, [laughs] when a little fly wonders into my web. I take the Gimp out and we have a party. But, it’s also where I play videogames. I told my wife and my kids, after 10:00 daddy goes away. Daddy goes to Skyrim. But my son, Jack, who is 10, it’s a great bonding experience for us. He just sits next to me and just watches and exhorts me to kill everyone. [laughs] It’s great. Sometimes I have to explain, “You know, daddy can’t kill this person. I need this person alive.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He looks at me just in disgust, the way that Patrick Verone looks at me, like a Scribblenaut. [laughs]

**John:** Years from now when your son turns to horrific violence, they will try to know why. It’s like, “I sat beside my father and watched him kill and kill and kill.”

**Craig:** Kill and kill and kill. Yes. Actually, there is one of the quest lines is there is something in Skyrim called the dark brotherhood where you join this group of assassins and your job is to go out and kill people. There’s, maybe, 20 quests just for that alone. I just did one with him where I had to go to a wedding. [laughs]

I had to kill the bride while she was addressing her guests. It had to be while she was addressing them. I don’t know why and I did it, and he was so delighted and he kept sort of playacting it over and over. Like, “She was standing there and she was like, ‘Oh, thank you for coming to my wedding …’ and then ah” [makes sound] . It was great, great father-son moment.

**John:** I am sure as he related the story back to your wife she was charmed and delighted.

**Craig:** He probably understands already that she wouldn’t care. So, I don’t think he talks about Skyrim to her. I have no doubt that the other kids in his class are getting an earful. I will likely be called into the principal’s office.

**John:** Yes. But, a small price to pay for the enjoyable saving or destroying of some fantasy kingdom.

**Craig:** Yes, I get to play videogames and my son loves me, win-win.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Win-win on the podcast. You did that, Craig.

**Craig:** Good podcast.

**John:** All right, and we will talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Thanks a lot.

**John:** Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.